Related papers: Simulations of astrometric planet detection in Alp…
Astrometric detection involves a precise measurement of stellar positions, and is widely regarded as the leading concept presently ready to find earth-mass planets in temperate orbits around nearby sun-like stars. The TOLIMAN space…
Improved quantum sensing of photons from astronomical objects could provide high resolution observations in the optical benefiting numerous fields, including general relativity, dark matter studies, and cosmology. It has been recently…
We present first results from five XMM-Newton observations of the binary system Alpha Centauri, which has been observed in snapshot like exposures of roughly two hours each during the last two years. In all our observations the X-ray…
Astrometric monitoring of stars provides a promising method for discovery of low-mass planets around nearby Sun-like stars. The astronomical community has proposed several telescopes designed to perform high-precision astrometric…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
(Abridged) The probability of detecting additional companions is essentially unchanged with respect to the single-planet configurations, but after fitting and subtraction of orbits with astrometric signal-to-noise ratio $\alpha/\sigma_d\to…
Direct imaging of extra-solar planets has now become a reality, especially with the deployment and commissioning of the first generation of specialized ground-based instruments such as the GPI, SPHERE, P1640 and SCExAO. These systems will…
A long-held astronomical vision is to realize diffraction-limited optical aperture synthesis over kilometer baselines. This will enable imaging of stellar surfaces and their environments, show their evolution over time, and reveal…
An extra-solar planet can be detected by microlensing because the planet can perturb the smooth lensing light curve created by the primary lens. However, it was shown by Gaudi that a subset of binary-source events can produce light curves…
This paper investigates the long-term orbital stability of small bodies near the central binary of the Alpha Centauri system. Test particles on circular orbits are integrated in the field of this binary for 32000 binary periods or…
Regardless of their close proximity, abundance measurements for both stars in {\alpha} Centauri by different groups have led to varying results. We have chosen to combine the abundance ratios from five similar data sets in order to reduce…
We have used the Palomar Testbed Interferometer to perform very high precision differential astrometry on the 0.25 arcsecond separation binary star HD 171779. In 70 minutes of observation we achieve a measurement uncertainty of…
Using the adaptive optics facilities at the 200-in Hale and 10-m Keck II, we observed in the near infrared a sample of 12 binary and multiple stars and one open cluster. We used the near diffraction limited images of these systems to…
We detect a cold, terrestrial planet in a binary-star system using gravitational microlensing. The planet has low mass (2 Earth masses) and lies projected at $a_{\perp,ph}$ ~ 0.8 astronomical units (AU) from its host star, similar to the…
We extend our study of the extent of the regions within the $\alpha$ Centauri AB star system where small planets are able to orbit for billion-year timescales (Quarles & Lissauer 2016, AJ 151, 111) to investigate the effects of minimizing…
With the inception of gravitational wave astronomy, astrophysical studies using interferometric techniques have begun to probe previously unknown parts of the universe. In this work, we investigate the potential of a new interferometric…
We evaluate the extent of the regions within the $\alpha$ Centauri AB star system where small planets are able to orbit for billion-year timescales, and we calculate the positions on the sky plane where planets on stable orbits about either…
Stars provide an enormous gain for interstellar communications at their gravitational focus, perhaps as part of an interstellar network. If the Sun is part of such a network, there should be probes at the gravitational foci of nearby stars.…
The light from a source at a distance d will arrive at detectors separated by 100 AU at times that differ by as much as 120 (d/100 Mpc)^{-1} nanoseconds because of the curvature of the wavefront. At gigahertz frequencies, the arrival time…
The direct imaging of Earth-like planets in solar neighbors is challenging. Both transit and radial velocity (RV) methods suffer from noise due to stellar activity. By choosing a typical configuration of an X array interferometer, we used…