Related papers: Comment on: "2005 VL1 is not Venera-2"
In the Solar system the planets' compositions vary with orbital distance, with rocky planets in close orbits and lower-density gas giants in wider orbits. The detection of close-in giant planets around other stars was the first clue that…
Several blazars, and BL Lac objects in particular, show a misalignment between the jet orientation on parsec and kiloparsec scales. Some authors (i.e. Conway & Murphy, 1993) have attempted to explain this behaviour invoking helical jets for…
We briefly review the status of various conventional quark-antiquark mesons below 2 GeV and outline some open questions: the status of the strange-antistrange orbitally excited vector meson, the status of the nonet of axial-tensor mesons…
We investigate in detail an apparently unnoticed consequence of special relativity. It consists in time dilation/contraction and frequency shift for emitted light affecting accelerated reference frames at astronomical distances from an…
We investigate the distance-redshift relation in the simple void model. As discussed by Moffat and Tatarski, if the observer stays at the center of the void, the observed Hubble parameter is not so different from the background Hubble…
A search is presented for heavy vector-like quarks (VLQs) that couple only to light quarks in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} =$ 8 TeV at the LHC. The data were collected by the CMS experiment during 2012 and correspond to an…
Up to now, most planet search projects have concentrated on F to K stars. In order to considerably widen the view, we have stated a survey for planets of old, nearby brown dwarfs and very low mass stars. Using UVES, we have observed 26…
Gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes provide a suitable arena to test the fundamental nature of gravity in the strong-field regime. Using the data of the inspiral of 29 events detected by the LIGO-Virgo observatories, we…
We measured the radial-velocity curve of HD77581, the B-supergiant companion of the X-ray pulsar Vela X-1, using 183 high-resolution optical spectra obtained in a nine-month campaign. We derive radial-velocity amplitudes for different lines…
A problem of constructing the trajectory of a spacecraft flight to Venus within the framework of a mission including landing of a lander in a given region of the planet's surface is being considered. A new celestial mechanics related method…
We present a multi-epoch (20 years baseline) kinematical investigation of HH52, 53, and 54 at optical and near-IR wavelengths, along with medium and high- resolution spectroscopic analyses, probing the kinematical and physical time…
The coincidence problems and other dynamical features of dark energy are studied in cosmological models with variable cosmological parameters and in models with the composite dark energy. It is found that many of the problems usually…
We present CCD VR_C observations of 6 distant comets located at heliocentric distances of 3.4--7.2 AU. Time-series data were obtained on three nights in July, 2000 covering 16 hours. Each comet was observed after the perihelion, when a…
The mass of the neutron star in Vela X-1 has been found to be more massive than the canonical 1.5 Mo. This result relies on the assumption that the amplitude of the optical component's measured radial velocity curve is not seriously…
For any realistic theory of quintessence that allows for a violation of the equivalence principle (VEP), we study the experimental constraints on such theories coming from ordinary matter as well as neutrinos. We discuss and compare…
Planetary-scale waves are thought to play a role in powering the yet-unexplained atmospheric superrotation of Venus. Puzzlingly, while Kelvin, Rossby and stationary waves manifest at the upper clouds (65--70 km), no planetary-scale waves or…
General Relativity (GR) quantitatively accounts for the anomalous perihelion precession observed in several planets' orbits, with Mercury exhibiting the most significant deviation from Newtonian predictions. In the present work, I carry out…
In this white paper, we propose an upgrade to the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consisting of the addition of a new 8m Unit Telescope (UT5). The primary goal of this upgrade is to optimise the VLTI for exoplanet detection by…
The atmosphere of a transiting planet shields the stellar radiation providing us with a powerful method to estimate its size and density. In particular, because of their high ionization energy, atoms with high atomic number (Z) absorb…
There is convincing observational evidence for an increasing cosmic-ray positron-to-electron ratio at energies larger than $\sim 10$~GeV, at odds with expectations from secondary positron production. The most recent AMS-02 data exhibit an…