Related papers: Centaur Nuclei: Sizes, Shapes, Spins, and Structur…
The asteroid belt is a unique source of information on some of the most important questions facing solar system science. These questions include the sizes, numbers, types and orbital distributions of the planetesimals that formed the…
Small bodies are the remnant building blocks from the time when the planets formed and migrated to their current positions. Their volatile composition and relative abundances serve as time capsules for the formation conditions in the…
$\omega$ Centauri, the most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way, has long been suspected to be the stripped nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that fell into the Galaxy a long time ago. There is considerable evidence for this scenario…
We consider the application of interferometry to measuring the sizes and shapes of small bodies in the solar system that cannot be spatially resolved by today's single-dish telescopes. Assuming ellipsoidal shapes, our results indicate that…
The dust measured in debris disks traces the position of planetesimal belts. In our Solar System, we are also able to measure the largest planetesimals directly and can extrapolate down to make an estimate of the dust. The zodiacal dust…
We present a detailed analysis of the spatial distribution of the stellar populations in the Galactic globular cluster omega Centauri. Taking advantage of the large photometric catalog published by Pancino et al. (2000), we confirm that…
It appears that at least several percent of large Kuiper belt objects are members of wide binaries. Physical collisions are too infrequent to account for their formation. Collisionless gravitational interactions are more promising. These…
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 shapes of galaxies trace scalar physics in the late-Universe through the large-scale gravitational potential. Are they also sensitive to higher-spin physics? We present a general study into the observational consequences of vector and…
In calorimetric neutrino mass experiments, where the shape of a beta decay spectrum has to be precisely measured, the understanding of the detector response function is a fundamental issue. In the MIBETA neutrino mass experiment, the X-ray…
The size distribution and total mass of objects in the Oort Cloud have important implications to the theory of planets formation, including the properties of, and the processes taking place in the early solar system. We discuss the…
The Sun provides a critical benchmark for the general study of stellar structure and evolution. Also, knowledge about the internal properties of the Sun is important for the understanding of solar atmospheric phenomena, including the solar…
We investigate what can be learned about a population of distant KBOs by studying the statistical properties of their light curves. Whereas others have successfully inferred the properties of individual, highly variable KBOs, we show that…
We present Suzaku observations of the Centaurus cluster out to 0.95r200, taken along a strip to the north west. We have also used congruent Chandra observations of the outskirts to resolve point sources down to a threshold flux around 7…
Binary formation is an important aspect of star formation. One possible route for close-in binary formation is disk fragmentation$^{[1,2,3]}$. Recent observations show small scale asymmetries (<300 au) around young protostars$^{[2,4]}$,…
A possible explanation for the central abundance dips found from spatially-resolved X-ray spectroscopy of several groups and clusters of galaxies is resonance scattering. A number of the prominent iron emission lines are resonance lines. We…
What is the size of the atomic nucleus? This deceivably simple question is difficult to answer. While the electric charge distributions in atomic nuclei were measured accurately already half a century ago, our knowledge of the distribution…
The `kernel' of the classical Kuiper belt was discovered by Petit et al. (2011) as a visual overdensity of objects with low ecliptic inclinations and eccentricities at semimajor axes near 44 AU. This raises the question - are there other…
A numerical simulation of the Oort cloud is used to explain the observed orbital distributions and numbers of Jupiter-family and Halley-type short-period comets. Comets are given initial orbits with perihelion distances between 5 and 36 AU,…
We present results of 6 years of observations, reduced and analyzed with the same tools in a systematic way. We report completely new data for 15 objects, for 5 objects we present a new analysis of previously published results plus…