Related papers: Occultation constraints on solar system formation …
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
Recent observations indicate that >99% of the small bodies in the Solar System reside in its outer reaches --- in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Kuiper Belt bodies are probably the best preserved representatives of the icy planetesimals…
The results of a search for sub-km Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations are reported. Photometric time series were obtained on the 1.8m telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) in…
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…
Most planetary systems -- including our own -- are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster's…
Objects in the Kuiper belt are small and far away thus difficult to study in detail even with the best telescopes available at earth. For much of the early history of the Kuiper belt, studies of the compositions of these objects were…
Most stars form in dense stellar environments, where frequent close encounters can strongly perturb and reshape the early architecture of planetary systems. The solar system, with its rich population of distant comets, provides a natural…
The cosmic history of star formation is briefly reviewed, starting with the Milky Way and then discussing observations relevant to the closed box and hierarchical build-up models. Observations of local star formation are reviewed for…
Star formation plays a central role in the evolution of galaxies and of the Universe as a whole. Studies of star-forming regions in the local universe have shown that star formation typically occurs in a clustered fashion. Building a…
Recent models and simulations of cluster formation within molecular clumps consider multi-scale, hierarchical accretion, which leads to clump mass growth over time. This mode of mass accumulation could have implications regarding the…
Large Kuiper Belt Objects are conventionally thought to have formed out of a massive planetesimal belt that is a few thousand times its current mass. Such a picture, however, is incompatible with multiple lines of evidence. Here, we present…
Even today in our Galaxy, stars form from gas cores in a variety of environments, which may affect the properties of resulting star and planetary systems. Here we study the role of pressure, parameterized via ambient clump mass surface…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
We present here the analysis of about 19,500 new star hours of low ecliptic latitude observations (|b| < 20 deg) obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope's FGS over a time span of more than nine years; which is an addition to the 12,000 star…
The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…
The process that leads to the formation and early evolution of low-mass stars is in a broad sense well understood theoretically and carefully traced observationally. The largest uncertainties in this framework reside in the poorly known…
The physical conditions in molecular clouds control the nature and rate of star formation, with consequences for planet formation and galaxy evolution. The focus of this review is on the conditions that characterize regions of star…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
Recent observational and theoretical work suggests that the formation of the Galactic stellar halo involved both dissipative processes and the accretion of subfragments. With present data, the fraction of the halo for which an accretion…
In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground breaking and key infrared measurements of Solar System objects near and far. Targets ranged from the smallest planetesimals to the giant…