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Galaxy haloes contain fundamental clues about the galaxy formation and evolution process: hierarchical cosmological models predict haloes to be ubiquitous, and to be (at least in part) the product of past merger and/or accretion events. The…
Recent progress in studies of globular clusters has shown that they are not simple stellar populations, being rather made of multiple generations. Evidence stems both from photometry and spectroscopy. A new paradigm is then arising for the…
The orbits of small bodies in the outer solar system are particularly sensitive to gravitational perturbations, including stellar flybys. Stellar clusters, with low velocity dispersions and high number densities, can be the source of strong…
The Edgeworth-Kuiper belt encodes the dynamical history of the outer solar system. Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) bear witness to coagulation physics, the evolution of planetary orbits, and external perturbations from the solar neighborhood. We…
The recent identification of several groups of young stars within 100 parsecs of the Sun has generated widespread interest. Given their proximity and possible age differences, these systems are ideally suited for detailed studies of disk…
The formation and assembly process of massive galaxies is a combination of two phases: an initial in-situ-dominated one followed by an ex-situ-dominated evolution. Separating these two contributions is therefore crucial to understand the…
The recent observations of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration (LVK) have provided a new opportunity for studying our Universe. By detecting several merging events of black holes (BHs), LVK has spurred the…
We discuss two new observational techniques that use observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) to place constraints upon the mass, distance, and size distribution of small objects in the Kuiper Belt and inner Oort Cloud,…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
A distant, massive planet in the outer solar system has recently been proposed to explain some observed features of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Here we use N-body simulations of the formation of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud as…
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened a window on many new puzzles in the early Universe, including a population of high-redshift star clusters with extremely high stellar surface density, suggesting unique star formation…
During the last three decades, evidence has mounted that star and planet formation is not an isolated process, but is influenced by current and previous generations of stars. Although cool stars form in a range of environments, from…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. In the protostellar phase, mass accretes from the core onto a protostar, likely through an accretion disk, and it is during this phase that the initial masses of…
Large-scale surveys of the Perseus molecular cloud have provided many clues as to the processes occurring during star formation. Here, analysis of both column density maps and kinematic data (maps and pointed data) are discussed and…
Solar evolutionary models are thus far unable to reproduce spectroscopic, helioseismic, and neutrino constraints consistently, resulting in the so-called solar modeling problem. In parallel, planet formation models predict that the evolving…
Little is known about the origins of the giant star clusters known as globular clusters. How can hundreds of thousands of stars form simultaneously in a volume only a few light years across the distance of the sun to its nearest neighbor?…
Our view on the deep universe has been so far biased towards optically bright galaxies. Now, the measurement of the Cosmic Infrared Background in FIRAS and DIRBE residuals, and the observations of FIR/submm sources by the ISOPHOT and SCUBA…