Related papers: Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Ob…
The outer solar system is theoretically predicted to harbour an undiscovered planet, often referred to as P9. Simulations suggest that its gravitational influence could explain the unusual clustering of minor bodies in the Kuiper Belt.…
Spatially localized one-electron orbitals, orthogonal and nonorthogonal, are widely used in electronic structure theory to describe chemical bonding and speed up calculations. In order to avoid linear dependencies of localized orbitals, the…
Short-arc orbit determination is crucial when an asteroid is first discovered. In these cases usually the observations are so few that the differential correction procedure may not converge. We have developed an initial orbit computation…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…
We describe a technique for solving for the orbital elements of multiple planets from radial velocity (RV) and/or astrometric data taken with 1 m/s and microarcsecond precision, appropriate for efforts to detect Earth-massed planets in…
A simple dynamical model is employed to study the possible orbital evolution of scattered planets and phase plane analysis is used to classify the parameter space and solutions. Our results reconfirm that there is always an increase in…
The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering…
The organization of the orbits of most minor bodies in the Solar system seems to follow random patterns, the result of billions of years of chaotic dynamical evolution. Much as heterogeneous orbital behaviour is ubiquitous, dynamically…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
We extend some previous results of our work [1] on the error of the averaging method, in the one-frequency case. The new error estimates apply to any separating family of seminorms on the space of the actions; they generalize our previous…
Birkhoff normal forms are commonly used in order to ensure the so called "effective stability" in the neighborhood of elliptic equilibrium points for Hamiltonian systems. From a theoretical point of view, this means that the eventual…
The prediction of stellar occultations by Transneptunian objects and Centaurs is a difficult challenge that requires accuracy both in the occulted star position as for the object ephemeris. Until now, the most used method of prediction…
In order to avoid collisions with space debris, the near Earth orbit must be continuously scanned by either ground- or spaced-based facilities. For the low Earth orbit, radar telescopes are the workhorse for this task, especially due to…
We describe a fast, approximate method to characterize the orbits of satellites around a central binary in numerical simulations. A goal is to distinguish the free eccentricity -- random motion of a satellite relative to a dynamically cool…
The secular approximation of the hierarchical three body systems has been proven to be very useful in addressing many astrophysical systems, from planets, stars to black holes. In such a system two objects are on a tight orbit, and the…
The apparent positions of planets are determined by means of the fundamental ephemerides, the precession-nutation models of the Earth, the gravitational effects and aberrations et al. Around 2000, many astrometrical conceptions, models and…
We develop a direct geometric method to determine the orbital parameters and mass of a planet, and we then apply the method to Neptune using high-precision data for the other planets in the solar system. The method is direct in the sense…
Orbital solutions for binary or multiple stellar systems that combine astrometry (e.g., position angles and angular separations) with spectroscopy (radial velocities) have important advantages over astrometric-only or spectroscopic-only…
Meteor showers on the Earth occur at well known times, and are associated with the decay of comets or other minor bodies whose orbital paths pass close to the Earth's trajectory. On the surface, determining the closest proximity of two…
We consider a two-dimensional, incompressible fluid body, together with self-induced interactions. The body is perturbed by an external particle with small mass. The whole configuration rotates uniformly around the common center of mass. We…