Related papers: Satellite shadows through stellar occultations
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
We measure the angular clustering of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 in order to probe the spatial distribution of satellite galaxies within their dark matter halos. Specifically, we measure the angular correlation…
Recent observations of surface brightness distributions of both Milky Way and M31 satellite galaxies have revealed many instances of sudden changes or breaks in the slope of the surface brightness profiles (at some break radius, r_break).…
Small dwarf companions have been long thought to have minimal influence on their host galaxy's evolution without undergoing direct impacts to the host's disc. However, in light of recent discoveries of coplanar, corotating satellite…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
Batygin and Brown (2016) have suggested the existence of a new Solar System planet supposed to be responsible for the perturbation of eccentric orbits of small outer bodies. The main challenge is now to detect and characterize this putative…
The orbital properties of infalling satellite halos set the initial conditions which control the subsequent evolution of subhalos and the galaxies that they host, with implications for mass stripping, star formation quenching, and merging.…
In recent years there appeared a need for astronomical observations timed with sub-millisecond accuracy. These include e.g. timing stellar occultations by small, sub-km or fast Near Earth Asteroids, but also tracking artificial satellites…
We address the problem of identifying remnants of satellite galaxies in the halo of our galaxy with Gaia data. The remnants have to be extracted from a very large data set (of order 10^9 stars) in the presence of observational errors and…
Physical processes regulating star formation in satellite galaxies represent an area of ongoing research, but the projected nature of observed coordinates makes separating different populations of satellites (with different processes at…
A variety of new physical processes have proven to play an important role in orbital decay of a satellite galaxy embedded inside a dark matter halo but this is not fully understood. Our goal is to assess if the orbital history of a…
We present preliminary results from a series of high-resolution N-body simulations that focus on 8 dark matter halos each of order a million particles within the virial radius. We follow the time evolution of hundreds of individually…
Radio telescopes observe extremely faint emission from astronomical objects, ranging from compact sources to large scale structures that can be seen across the whole sky. Satellites actively transmit at radio frequencies (particularly at…
Microlensing and occultation are generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when recently discovered Kuiper-Belt objects (KBOs) occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction…
The PHOT (Portable High-Speed Occultation Telescope) systems were developed for the specific purpose of observing stellar occultations by solar system objects. Stellar occultations have unique observing constraints: they may only be…
Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…
Context: With no conclusive detection to date, the search for exomoons, satellites of planets orbiting other stars, remains a formidable challenge. Detecting these objects, compiling a population-level sample and constraining their…
Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
Recently, mega-constellations with a massive number of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are being considered as a possible solution for providing global coverage due to relatively low latency and high throughput compared to geosynchronous…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted ~100-200 luminous satellite galaxies in the past \~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus N-body approach…