Related papers: The Distribution of Earth-Impacting Interstellar O…
Ground-based interferometers are not perfectly all-sky instruments, and it is important to account for their behavior when considering the distribution of detected events. In particular, the LIGO detectors are most sensitive to sources…
An asteroid family forms as a result of a collision between an impactor and a parent body. The fragments with ejection speeds higher than the escape velocity from the parent body can escape its gravitational pull. The cloud of escaping…
A transiting planet eclipses part of the rotating stellar surface, thereby producing an anomalous Doppler shift of the stellar spectrum. Here I review how this "Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect" can be used to characterize exoplanetary systems.…
Large impacts onto young rocky planets may transform their compositions, creating highly reducing conditions at their surfaces and reintroducing highly siderophile metals to their mantles. Key to these processes is the availability of an…
We present a new analysis of the currently available orbital elements for the known Kuiper belt objects. In the non-resonant, main Kuiper belt we find a statistically significant relationship between an object's absolute magnitude (H) and…
ESA and NASA maintain asteroid hazard lists that contain all known asteroids with a non zero chance of colliding with the Earth in the future. Some software tools exist that are, either, capable of calculating the impact points of those…
The first interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the impact rate of interstellar meteors of its size $\sim 100\;$m. The discovery of CNEOS 2014-01-08 allowed…
We carry out experiments of 104 m/s velocity oblique impacts into a granular medium (sand). Impact craters have nearly round rims even at a grazing angle of about $10^\circ$, however, the strength of seismic pulses excited by the impact is…
The distribution of orbital period ratios of adjacent planets in extra-solar planetary systems discovered by the {\it Kepler} space telescope exhibits a peak near $\sim1.5$--$2$, a long tail of larger period ratios, and a steep drop-off in…
The probability of detecting a planetary companion of a lensing star during a microlensing event toward the Galactic center, averaged over all relevant event and galactic parameters, when the planet-star mass ratio $q=0.001$ has a maximum…
Since the late 1950s, when the first artificial satellite was launched, the number of Resident Space Objects has steadily increased. It is estimated that around one million objects larger than one cm are currently orbiting the Earth, with…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
The orbital eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is shaped by a combination of dynamical processes, reflecting both formation conditions and long-term evolution. Probing the orbital dynamics of planets in the kinematic thin and thick…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
Changes in planetary obliquity, or axial tilt, influence the climates on Earth-like planets. In the solar system, the Earth's obliquity is stabilized due to interactions with our moon and the resulting {small amplitude variations…
Corotating interaction regions (CIRs) are compressions that form in stellar winds when streams of different speeds collide. They form an Archimedean spiral around the star and can compress any exoplanetary magnetospheres they impact. They…
The discovery of two interstellar objects passing through the Solar System, 1I/`Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, implies that a galactic population exists with a spatial number density of order $\sim0.1$ au$^{-3}$. The forthcoming Rubin Observatory…
We use numerical $N$-body experiments to explore the statistics of multiple systems formed in small-$N$ subclusters, i.e. the distributions of orbital semi-major axis, $a$, orbital eccentricity, $e$, mass ratio, $q$, mutual orbital…
A framework for the theoretical and analytical understanding of the impact crater-size frequency distribution is developed and applied to observed data from Mars and Earth. The analitical model derived gives the crater population,N, as a…
Direct detection experiments search for the interactions of Dark Matter (DM) particles with nuclei in terrestrial detectors. But if these interactions are sufficiently strong, DM particles may scatter in the Earth, affecting their…