Related papers: No Death Star -- For Now
Kepler is a space telescope that searches Sun-like stars for planets. Its major goal is to determine {\eta}_Earth, the fraction of Sunlike stars that have planets like Earth. When a planet 'transits' or moves in front of a star, Kepler can…
We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS 1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated towards small…
The extraordinary weather conditions available between February and March 2022 over Spain have allowed us to analyze the brightest fireballs recorded by the monitoring stations of the Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN). We study the atmospheric…
Close encounters between stars in star forming regions are important as they can perturb or destroy protoplanetary discs, young planetary systems, and stellar multiple systems. We simulate simple, viralised, equal-mass $N$-body star…
We have examined consequences of strong tidal encounters between a neutron star and a normal star using SPH as a possible formation mechanism of isolated recycled pulsars in globular clusters. We have made a number of SPH simulations for…
The Sun will eventually lose about half of its current mass nonlinearly over several phases of post-main sequence evolution. This mass loss will cause any surviving orbiting body to increase its semimajor axis and perhaps vary its…
Material arriving at our solar system from the Galaxy may be detected at Earth in the form of meteors ablating in our atmosphere. Here we report on a search for interstellar meteors within the highest-quality events in the Global Meteor…
Most stars are formed in a cluster or association, where the number density of stars can be high. This means that a large fraction of initially-single stars will undergo close encounters with other stars and/or exchange into binaries. We…
A debris disk is a constituent of any planetary system surrounding a main sequence star. We study whether close stellar encounters can disrupt and strip a debris disk of its planetesimals in the expanding open cluster of its birth with a…
We have searched the Forth Catalogue of Nearby Stars for halo stars and identified 15 subdwarfs and a high velocity white dwarf in the solar neighbourhood. This search was motivated mainly by the recent determinations of MACHO masses of…
The Galactic bulge is a tumultuous dense region of space, packed with stars separated by far smaller distances than those in the Solar neighborhood. A quantification of the frequency and proximity of close stellar encounters in this…
Recent numerical studies argue that low-mass stars can be formed even at zero-metallicity environment. These low-mass Population III(Pop.~III) stars are thought to be still shining and able to be observed in the Local Universe. Most…
This paper presents new results from a photometric study of the main-sequence stars in M4, the closest globular cluster to the sun. Multi-field, multi-epoch observations at approximately 1, 2, and 6 core-radii were obtained with the WFPC2…
Excess near-infrared emission is detected around one fifth of main-sequence stars, but its nature is a mystery. These excesses are interpreted as thermal emission from populations of small, hot dust very close to their stars (`hot…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
Motivated by recent observations that suggest a low density of old stars around the Milky Way supermassive black hole, models for the nuclear star cluster are considered that have not yet reached a steady state under the influence of…
There is increasing evidence that low mass stars with circumstellar disks can be born close to massive stars, in some cases within tenths of a pc. If the disks have lifetimes greater than those of the more massive stars, they are exposed to…
Most stars form as part of a stellar group. These young stars are mostly surrounded by a disk from which potentially a planetary system might form. Both, the disk and later on the planetary system, may be affected by the cluster environment…
Theory predicts and observations confirm that low-mass stars (like the Sun) in their early life grow by accreting gas from the surrounding material. But for stars ~ 10 times more massive than the Sun (~10 M_sun), the powerful stellar…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…