Related papers: Evidence for an extended scattered disk
The existence of Planet Nine has been suggested to explain the pericenter clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). However, the underlying dynamics involving Planet Nine, test particles and Neptune is rich, and it remains…
Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…
Observations indicate that the gaseous circumstellar disks around young stars vary significantly in size, ranging from tens to thousands of AU. Models of planet formation depend critically upon the properties of these primordial disks, yet…
We conducted a very long baseline interferometric observation of 5 nearby pulsars and did not resolve the scattering disks of any of these sources. Using our upper limits on the angular diameters of these scattering disks and published…
A fundamental question in the study of planetary system demographics is: how common is the solar system architecture? The primary importance of this question lies in the potential of planetary systems to create habitable environments, and…
We improve, using a larger set of observations including Voyager 2 Neptune flyby data, previous bounds on the amount of dark matter (DM) trapped in a spherically symmetric distribution about the sun. We bound DM by noting that such a…
Observations in the past decade have revealed extrasolar planets with a wide range of orbital semimajor axes and eccentricities. Based on the present understanding of planet formation via core accretion and oligarchic growth, we expect that…
The post-Newtonian orbital effects induced by the mass quadrupole and spin octupole moments of an isolated, oblate spheroid of constant density that is rigidly and uniformly rotating on the motion of a test particle are analytically worked…
Recently, Brown et al. (2004) reported the exciting discovery of an ~800 km radius object, (90377) Sedna, on a distant, eccentric orbit centered at ~490 AU from the Sun. Here we undertake a first look exploring the feasibility of accreting…
In the last years several exoplanets have been discovered that orbit one component of a compact binary system (separation < 50 astronomical units), the probably best-known case is gamma-Cephei. So far, all attempts to explain the in-situ…
Among the current population of the 81 known trans-Neptunian binaries (TNBs), only two are in orbits that cross the orbit of Neptune. These are (42355) Typhon-Echidna and (65489) Ceto-Phorcys. In the present work, we focused our analyses on…
Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet located well beyond Pluto that has been proposed in an attempt to explain the observed clustering in physical space of the perihelia of six extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs. The predicted…
The Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs) are thought to be a small fraction of the ancient population of leftover planetesimals in the outer solar system that were gravitationally scattered by the giant planets and have managed to survive…
The Kuiper belt is a population of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. The complex orbital structure of the Kuiper belt, including several categories of objects inside and outside of resonances with Neptune, emerged as a result of…
The richness of dynamical behavior exhibited by the rotational states of various solar system objects has driven significant advances in the theoretical understanding of their evolutionary histories. An important factor that determines…
In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this…
We present observations of 32 primarily bright, newly discovered Transneptunian objects observable from the Southern Hemisphere during 39 nights of observation with the 2.5-m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. Our dataset includes…
We show that the existence of prograde equatorial satellites is consistent with a collisional tilting scenario for Uranus. In fact, if the planet was surrounded by a proto-satellite disk at the time of the tilting and a massive ring of…
Milgromian dynamics (MD or MOND) uniquely predicts motion in a galaxy from the distribution of its stars and gas in a remarkable agreement with observations so far. In the solar system, MD predicts the existence of some possibly…
We investigate the origins of the photometrically Very Red and Less Red Trans-Neptunian Objects. We first reanalyse the dataset of Marsset et al. 2019 and find that, in addition to the known color-inclination correlation in hot TNOs, a…