Related papers: Accretion in the Early Outer Solar System
A detailed study of comets active at large heliocentric distances (greater than 4 au) which enter the Solar System for the first time and are composed of matter in its elementary, unprocessed state, would help in our understanding of the…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
I show that a dedicated space telescope with a meter-size aperture can detect numerous interstellar objects, 10-m in diameter, that pass within ~20 degrees from the Sun. Separating the emitted thermal radiation from the reflection of…
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…
The interpretation of observations over different wavelength domains, which now exist over a large fraction of the sky, will be used to determine relationships between a nebula and its' illuminating source. The illuminating source of a high…
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…
We have explored a method for finding giant planets in the outer Solar System by detecting their thermal emission and proper motion between two far-infrared all-sky surveys separated by 23.4 years, taken with the InfraRed Astronomical…
Motivated by debris disk studies, we investigate the gravitational microlensing of background starlight by a planetesimal disk around a foreground star. We use dynamical survival models to construct a plausible example of a planetesimal…
Newly-formed planetary systems with ages of <10 Myr offer many unique insights into the formation, evolution, and fundamental properties of extrasolar planets. These planets have fallen beyond the limits of past surveys, but as we enter the…
One of the most fundamental problems in the study of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) is to know their true physical size. Without knowledge of their albedos we are not able to distinguish large and dark from small and bright KBOs. Spitzer…
It has been proposed that the observed systems of hot super-Earths formed in situ from high-mass disks. By fitting a disk profile to the entire population of Kepler planet candidates, Chiang & Laughlin (2013) constructed a "minimum-mass…
The properties of bright extragalactic planetary nebulae are reviewed based upon the results of low and high resolution spectroscopy. It is argued that bright extragalactic planetary nebulae from galaxies (or subsystems) with and without…
The recent identification of several groups of young stars within 100 parsecs of the Sun has generated widespread interest. Given their proximity and possible age differences, these systems are ideally suited for detailed studies of disk…
We describe comprehensive calculations of the formation of icy planets and debris disks at 30-150 AU around 1-3 solar mass stars. Disks composed of large, strong planetesimals produce more massive planets than disks composed of small, weak…
A key outstanding question in star and planet formation is how far the initial mass function of stars and sub-stellar objects extends, and whether or not there is a cut-off at the very lowest masses. Isolated objects in the planetary-mass…
We report the discovery, tracking and detection circumstances for 85 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) from the first 42 deg$^{2}$ of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS). This ongoing $r$-band Solar System survey uses the 0.9…
Objects in the Kuiper belt are small and far away thus difficult to study in detail even with the best telescopes available at earth. For much of the early history of the Kuiper belt, studies of the compositions of these objects were…
We summarise recent progress in the understanding of the rotational evolution of low-mass stars (here defined as solar mass down to the hydrogen burning limit) both in terms of observations and modelling. Wide-field imaging surveys on…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
The six-degree obliquity of the sun suggests that either an asymmetry was present in the solar system's formation environment, or an external torque has misaligned the angular momentum vectors of the sun and the planets. However, the exact…