Related papers: Kuiper Binary Object Formation
The dynamical interaction of minor bodies (such as comets or asteroids) with planets plays an essential role in the planetary system's architecture and evolution. As a result of these interactions, structures like the Kuiper belt and the…
Recent observations have suggested that circumstellar disks may commonly form around young stellar objects. Although the formation of circumstellar disks can be a natural result of the conservation of angular momentum in the parent cloud,…
We report high precision photometry of three small and one larger Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (ACS/HST). The three small bodies are the smallest KBOs for which…
Although it is commonly agreed that the presence of a close stellar companion is likely to affect planet formation and evolution, the precise effects and their actual impact on planet occurrence and properties are still debated. In…
Binaries containing a compact object orbiting a supermassive black hole are thought to be precursors of gravitational wave events, but their identification has been extremely challenging. Here, we report quasi-periodic variability in X-ray…
The existence of planets born in environments highly perturbed by a stellar companion represents a major challenge to the paradigm of planet formation. In numerical simulations, the presence of a close binary companion stirs up the relative…
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…
Via joint analysis of a calibrated telescopic survey, which found scattering Kuiper Belt objects, and models of their expected orbital distribution, we measure the form of the scattering object's size distribution. Ruling out a single…
The formation of compact objects like stars and black holes is strongly constrained by the requirement that nearly all of the initial angular momentum of the diffuse material from which they form must be removed or redistributed during the…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) may form before cosmological first-order phase transitions, leading to inevitable collisions between PBHs and bubble walls. In this Letter, we have simulated for the first time the co-evolution of an expanding…
Clumps of material orbiting a black hole may be disturbed, somewhat like comets in the Kuiper belt, to relatively small periastron orbits. Each periastron passage changes the orbital parameters in such a way that the orbit becomes more and…
The dust produced in the Kuiper Belt (KB) spreads throughout the Solar System forming a dust disk. We numerically model the orbital evolution of KB dust and estimate its equilibrium spatial distribution and its brightness and spectral…
Context. A large fraction of transneptunian objects are found in binary pairs, ~30% in the cold classical population between $a_\text{hel}$~39 and ~48 AU. Observationally, these binaries generally have components of similar size and colour.…
Many short-period binary stars have distant orbiting companions that have played a role in driving the binary components into close separation. Indirect detection of a tertiary star is possible by measuring apparent changes in eclipse times…
The abundance of massive primordial black holes has historically been constrained by dynamical probes. Since these objects can participate in hard few-body scattering processes, they can readily transfer energy to stellar systems, and, in…
A hypothetical gravitating body in the outer Solar System, the so-called Planet Nine, was proposed to explain the unexpected clustering of the Kuiper Belt Objects. As it has not been observed via telescopes, it was conjectured to be a…
Analyzing the available photometry from the Kepler satellite and other databases, we performed detailed light curve modeling of 10 eclipsing binary systems that were found to exhibit a periodic modulation of their orbital periods. All of…
To explain both the dynamics of a globular cluster and its production of gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes, it is necessary to understand its population of dynamically-formed (or, `three-body') binaries. We provide a…
Orbital period changes of binary stars may be caused by the presence of a third massive body in the system. Here we have searched the archive of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP) project for evidence of period variations in…
We modeled the 3-D structure of the Kuiper Belt dust cloud at four different dust production rates, incorporating both planet-dust interactions and grain-grain collisions using the collisional grooming algorithm. Simulated images of a model…