Related papers: Irregular moons possibly injected from the outer s…
According to the strange quark matter hypothesis, strange planets may exist, which are planetary mass objects composed of almost equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks. A strange planet can revolve around its host strange star in a…
Among the near-Earth object (NEO) population there are comets and active asteroids which are sources of fragments that initially move together; in addition, some NEOs follow orbits temporarily trapped in a web of secular resonances. These…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
Recent surveys have revealed a lack of close-in planets around evolved stars more massive than 1.2 Msun. Such planets are common around solar-mass stars. We have calculated the orbital evolution of planets around stars with a range of…
A considerable portion of near-Earth objects could have come from the trans-Neptunian belt. Some of them have aphelia deep inside Jupiter's orbit during more than 1 Myr.
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
We recommend an intensive effort to survey and understand the obliquity distribution of small close-in extrasolar planets over the coming decade. The orbital obliquities of exoplanets--i.e., the relative orientation between the planetary…
We investigate modons on tidally synchronised extrasolar planets. Modons are highly dynamic, coherent flow structures composed of a pair of storms with opposite signs of vorticity. They are important because they divert flows on the…
We formulated tidal decay lifetimes for hypothetical moons orbiting extrasolar planets with both lunar and stellar tides. Previous work neglected the effect of lunar tides on planet rotation, and are therefore applicable only to systems in…
We explore conventional Neptune migration model with one additional planet of mass at 0.1-2.0 Me. This planet inhabited in the 3:2 mean motion resonance with Neptune during planet migration epoch, and then escaped from the Kuiper belt when…
We show that the fate of moons of a close-in giant planet is mainly determined by the migration history of the planet in the protoplanetary disk. As the planet migrates in the disk from beyond the snow line towards a multi-day period orbit,…
According to the giant impact theory, the Moon formed by accreting the circum-terrestrial debris disk produced by Theia colliding with the proto-Earth. The giant impact theory can explain most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system,…
We continue our exploration of whether the flyby anomalies can be explained by scattering of spacecraft nucleons from dark matter gravitationally bound to the earth, with the addition of data from five new flybys to that from the original…
Stochastic impacts by large bodies are, at present, the usually accepted mechanisms able to account for the obliquity of the ice giants. We attempt to set constraints on giant impacts as the cause of Neptune's current obliquity in the…
Conversion from neutron stars to strange stars as a possible mechanism of cosmological gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) has been discussed in previous works, although the existence of strange stars is still an open question. On the basis of this…
Many observational results seem to indicate more efficient mixing processes in intermediate mass stars (5-20 M$_{\odot}$) than the expected by the standard models. These processes are usually thought to be caused by stellar rotation. Our…
The Earth's comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic…
All 4 giant planets in the Solar System host systems of multiple moons, whereas the terrestrial planets only host up to 2 moons. The Earth can capture small asteroids as temporary satellites, which begs the question as to how many moons…
The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…