Related papers: Past the outer rim, into the unknown: structures b…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
Recent observations (Burnes2002,Veillet2002,Margot2002a) have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper Belt. The TNO binaries are strikingly different from asteroid…
The Centaurs are a population of small, planet-crossing objects in the outer solar system. They are dynamically short-lived and represent the transition population between the Kuiper belt and the Jupiter family short-period comets.…
Inward migration of giant planets is predicted by hydrodynamical simulations during the gas phase of the protoplanetary disc. The phenomenon is also invoked to explain resonant and near-resonant exoplanetary system structures. The early…
With more than 15 years since the the first radial velocity discovery of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star, the time baseline for radial velocity surveys is now extending out beyond the orbit of Jupiter analogs. The sensitivity to exoplanet…
The short period Jupiter family comets (JFCs) are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt; specifically, a dynamical subclass of the Kuiper Belt known as the `scattered disk' is argued to be the dominant source of JFCs. However, the best…
Past and future dynamical evolution of all 64 long period comets having 1/aori< 1\times10-4 au-1 and qosc > 3.0 au and discovered after 1970 is studied. For all of them we obtained a new, homogeneous set of osculating orbits, including 15…
Due to the foreground extinction of the Milky Way, galaxies appear increasingly fainter the closer they lie to the Galactic Equator, creating a "zone of avoidance" of about 25% in the distribution of optically visible galaxies. A…
Via joint analysis of a calibrated telescopic survey, which found scattering Kuiper Belt objects, and models of their expected orbital distribution, we measure the form of the scattering object's size distribution. Ruling out a single…
The planets of our solar system formed from a gas-dust disk. However, there are some properties of the solar system that are peculiar in this context. First, the cumulative mass of all objects beyond Neptune (TNOs) is only a fraction of…
Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and…
The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New…
It is a well-known fact that the presence of a massive perturber interacting with a population of minor bodies following very eccentric orbits can strongly affect the distribution of their nodal distances. The details of this process have…
The dynamical interaction of minor bodies (such as comets or asteroids) with planets plays an essential role in the planetary system's architecture and evolution. As a result of these interactions, structures like the Kuiper belt and the…
It appears that at least several percent of large Kuiper belt objects are members of wide binaries. Physical collisions are too infrequent to account for their formation. Collisionless gravitational interactions are more promising. These…
The orbital distribution of transneptunian objects (TNOs) in the distant Kuiper Belt (with semimajor axes beyond the 2:1 resonance, roughly $a$=50-100 au) provides constraints on the dynamical history of the outer solar system. Recent…
Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been…
Looking at the orbits of small bodies with large semimajor axes, we are compelled to see patterns. Some of these patterns are noted as strong indicators of new or hidden processes in the outer Solar System, others are substantially…
The binary star system gamma Cephei is unusual in that it harbours a stable giant planet around the larger star at a distance only about a tenth of that of the stellar separation. Numerical simulations are carried out into the stability of…