Related papers: A Targeted Search for Main Belt Comets

We present JWST NIRSpec and NIRCam observations of 457P/Lemmon-PANSTARRS, a main-belt comet that displayed activity around its 2020 perihelion and that was observed to regain activity during its 2024 perihelion by a ground-based observing…

We report results from new and archival observations of the newly discovered active asteroid (248370) 2005 QN_137, which has been determined to be a likely main-belt comet based on a subsequent discovery that it is recurrently active near…

Comet 133P/Elst-Pizarro is the first-known and currently best-characterised member of the main-belt comets, a recently-identified class of objects that exhibit cometary activity but which are dynamically indistinguishable from main-belt…

We conducted a search for occultations of bright stars by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) to estimate the density of sub-km KBOs in the sky. We report here the first results of this occultation survey of the outer solar system conducted in June…

We present the results of "snapshot" numerical integrations of test particles representing comet-like and asteroid-like objects in the inner solar system aimed at investigating the short-term dynamical evolution of objects close to the…

Dynamical mass estimates for the main asteroid belt and the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt have been found from their gravitational influence on the motion of planets. Discrete rotating models consisting of moving material points have been…

We present an observational and dynamical study of newly discovered main-belt comet 313P/Gibbs. We find that the object is clearly active both in observations obtained in 2014 and in precovery observations obtained in 2003 by the Sloan…

We present initial results from observations and numerical analyses aimed at characterizing main-belt comet P/2012 T1 (PANSTARRS). Optical monitoring observations were made between October 2012 and February 2013 using the University of…

A significant fraction of Milky Way (MW) satellites exhibit phase-space properties consistent with a coherent orbital plane. Using tailored N--body simulations of a spherical MW halo that recently captured a massive (1.8$\times…

We investigated the size distribution of high-inclination main-belt asteroids (MBAs) to explore asteroid collisional evolution under hypervelocity collisions of around 10 km/s. We performed a wide-field survey for high-inclination sub-km…

Context: Increasingly, Oort Cloud comets are being discovered at great distances from the Sun and tracked over ever wider ranges of heliocentric distances as observational equipment improves. Aims: To investigate in detail how the original…

For the last two decades we have been observing a huge increase in discoveries of long-period comets (LPCs), especially those with large-perihelion distances. We collected data for a full sample of LPCs discovered over the 1801-2017 period…

Despite decades of direct and indirect searches within the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) framework, no conclusive results have been found in the GeV--TeV range. This has motivated exploring alternatives, including new particles…

We report on the serendipitous observations of Solar System objects imaged during the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS) 2014 observation campaign. Data from this high cadence, wide field survey was originally analyzed for finding…

There is a group of newly recognized asteroids in the main belt that are exhibiting cometary characteristics. We will call them Asteroidal Belt Comets or ABCs. An analysis of their orbital and physical properties has resulted in the…

We present observations of main-belt comet 358P/PANSTARRS (P/2012 T1) obtained using the Gemini South telescope from 2017 July to 2017 December, as the object approached perihelion for the first time since its discovery. We find best-fit…

There is an unceasing incoming flux of extraterrestrial materials reaching the Earth's atmosphere. Some of these objects produce luminous columns when they ablate during the hypersonic encounter with air molecules. A few fireballs occur…

The prime objective is to settle a contradiction between a high nongravitational acceleration affecting the orbital motion of comet C/1995 O1 and its enormous nucleus by modeling it as a compact cluster of boulder-sized fragments held…

We present a new catalogue of 578 OB cluster (OBC) candidates in the Andromeda galaxy (M31), identified using a MeanShift-based algorithm on HST's F275W-band imaging from the PHAT (Dalcanton et al. 2012) and PHAST (Chen et al. 2025) Hubble…

We present the Citizen Science program Active Asteroids and describe discoveries stemming from our ongoing project. Our NASA Partner program is hosted on the Zooniverse online platform and launched on 2021 August 31, with the goal of…