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Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…
Spectroscopic observations have been carried out for eleven objects believed to be planetary nebulae on the basis of their optical appearance. They were discovered in an ongoing deep search for galaxies in the Southern Milky Way…
A large fraction of white dwarfs (WDs) may host planets in their habitable zones. These planets may provide our best chance to detect bio-markers on a transiting exoplanet, thanks to the diminished contrast ratio between the Earth-sized WD…
We analyze the properties of searches devoted to finding planetary transits by observing simple stellar systems, such as globular clusters, open clusters, and the Galactic bulge. We develop the analytic tools necessary to predict the number…
An outstanding, multi-disciplinary goal of modern science is the study of the diversity of potentially Earth-like planets and the search for life in them. This goal requires a bold new generation of space telescopes, but even the most…
The sample of known star clusters, the fundamental building blocks of galaxies, in the Milky Way is still extremely incomplete for objects beyond a distance of 1-2kpc. Many of the more distant and young clusters are compact and hidden…
The radial velocities are measured for 45 galaxies located in the neighborhoods of 29 likely isolated galaxies in a new catalog. We find that about 85% of these galaxies actually are well isolated objects. 4% of nearby galaxies with…
The recent observation of interstellar objects, 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov cross the solar system opened new opportunities for planetary science and planetary defense. As the first confirmed objects originating outside of the solar system,…
Till today, the nature of Dark Matter (DM) remains elusive despite all our efforts. This missing matter of the universe has not been observed by the already operating DM direct-detection experiments, but we can infer its gravitational…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…
The torques exerted by a locally isothermal disk on an embedded planet lead to rapid inward migration. Recent work has shown that modeling the thermodynamics without the assumption of local isothermality reveals regions where the net torque…
Our knowledge of the populations and occurrence rates of planets orbiting evolved intermediate-mass stars lags behind that for solar-type stars by at least a decade. Some radial velocity surveys have targeted these low-luminosity giant…
The addition of an external starshade to the {\it Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope} will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at $\sim$1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both…
Having discovered that Earth-sized planets are common, we are now embarking on a journey to determine if Earth-like planets are also common. Finding Earth-like planets is one of the most compelling endeavors of the 21st century - leading us…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
All of the known circumbinary planets are large (> 3 Earth radii). Whilst observational biases may account for this dearth of small planets, in this paper we propose a theoretical explanation. Most of the known planets are near the…
We present an analytic model to estimate the total number of rocky or icy objects that could be captured by planetary systems within the Milky Way galaxy and result in panspermia should they harbor life. We estimate the capture rate of…
We have searched for planetary companions around 800 pulsars monitored at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, with both circular and eccentric orbits of periods between $20$ days and $17$ years and inclination-dependent planetary masses from…
Stars often reside in binary configurations. The nuclear star cluster surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic Center (GC) is expected to include a binary population. In this dense environment, a binary frequently…