Related papers: Centaur Nuclei: Sizes, Shapes, Spins, and Structur…

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…

This chapter of the book Planetary Ring Systems addresses the origin of planetary rings, one of the least understood processes related to planet formation and evolution. Whereas rings seem ubiquitous around giant planets, their great…

In 1977, while Apple II and Atari computers were being sold, a tiny dot was observed in an inconvenient orbit. The minor body 1977 UB, to be named (2060) Chiron, with an orbit between Saturn and Uranus, became the first Centaur, a new class…

Brown dwarfs can serve as both clocks and chemical tracers of the evolutionary history of the Milky Way due to their continuous cooling and high sensitivity of spectra to composition. We focus on brown dwarfs in globular clusters that host…

For three decades, adaptive optic surveys have revealed an excess of T Tauri binaries across a = 10-100 au in nearby star-forming regions compared to the field population of main-sequence (MS) stars. Such an excess requires that most stars…

Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…

The orbital element distribution of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with large pericenters has been suggested to be influenced by the presence of an undetected, large planet at >200 AU from the Sun. To find additional observables caused by…

The size of the core is one of the main diagnostics of the evolutionary state of a globular cluster. Much has been learned over the last few years about the behavior of the core radius during and after core collapse, under a variety of…

Escalating observations of exo-minor planets and their destroyed remnants both passing through the solar system and within white dwarf planetary systems motivate an understanding of the orbital history and fate of exo-Kuiper belts and…

In this paper we address the issue of the origin of some observational properties of the galactic globular cluster system. After a preliminary study of some general properties of the main evolutionary processes, we investigate the evolution…

Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain…

We review recent progress in high-resolution imaging of scattered light from disks around young stellar objects. Many new disks have been discovered or imaged in scattered light, and improved instrumentation and observing techniques have…

Quasars are the earliest objects known to exist. We examine their origin in the context of popular models for structure formation in the universe. We show that seeds for quasar black holes could have originated from the initial cosmological…

This paper studies the dynamical evolution of young stellar clusters with $N$ = 100 - 1000 members. We use N-body simulations to explore how evolution depends on system size $N$ and the initial conditions. Motivated by recent observations…

Spitzer Space Telescope mid-infrared images of the radio galaxy Centaurus A reveal a shell-like, bipolar, structure 500 pc to the north and south of the nucleus. This shell is seen in 5.8, 8.0 and 24 micron broad-band images. Such a…

In this work we present the results of a suite of dynamical simulations following the orbital evolution of 8,022 hypothetical Centaur objects. These Centaurs begin our integrations on orbits in the vicinity of the 2:1 mean motion resonance…

The Kepler transit survey with follow-up spectroscopic observations has discovered numerous super-Earth sized planets and revealed intriguing features of their sizes, orbital periods, and their relations between adjacent planets. For the…

Knowledge of the Kuiper Belt is currently limited to those objects that can be detected directly. Objects with diameters less than $\sim$10km reflect too little light to be detected. These smaller bodies could contain most of the mass in…

We present synthetic spectra for circumstellar disks that are heated by radiation from a central brown dwarf. Under the assumption of vertical hydrostatic equilibrium, our models yield scaleheights for brown dwarf disks in excess of three…

Context: High-resolution images of circumstellar debris discs reveal off-centred rings that indicate past or ongoing perturbation, possibly caused by secular gravitational interaction with unseen stellar or substellar companions. The purely…