Related papers: Accretion in the Early Outer Solar System
Debris belts on the periphery of planetary systems, encompassing the region occupied by planetary orbits, are massive analogues of the Solar system's Kuiper belt. They are detected by thermal emission of dust released in collisions amongst…
Evidence from the analysis of eclipsing binary systems revealed that late-type stars are larger and cooler than predicted by models, and that this is probably caused by stellar magnetic activity. In this work, we revisit this problem taking…
By following the evolution of several observed exoplanetary systems we show that by lowering the mass loss rate of single solar-like stars during their two giant branches, these stars will swallow their planets at the tip of their…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
Hundreds of gravitational microlensing events have now been detected towards the Galactic bulge, with many more to come. The detection of fine structure in these events has been theorized to be an excellent way to discover extra-solar…
Remote-sensing observations of Solar System objects with a space telescope offer a key method of understanding celestial bodies and contributing to planetary formation and evolution theories. The capabilities of Twinkle, a space telescope…
We propose an ecliptic Deep Drilling Field that will discover some 10,000~small and faint Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) --- primitive rocky/icy bodies that orbit at the outside of our Solar System and uniquely record the processes of planetary…
By collecting distances from the literature, a set of 73 planetary nebulae with mean distances of high accuracy is derived. This sample is used for recalibration of the mass-radius relationship, used by many statistical distance methods. An…
We investigate the prospects for detecting dust from two body collisions during the late stages of planet formation at 1-150 AU. We develop an analytic model to describe the formation of a dusty cloud of debris and use numerical coagulation…
We have performed a survey of the Kuiper belt covering ~ 1/3 a square degree of the sky using Suprime-cam on the Subaru telescope, to a limiting magnitude of m(R)~ 26.8 (50% threshold) and have found 36 new KBOs. We have confirmed that the…
The architecture and evolution of planetary systems are shaped in part by stellar flybys. Within this context, we look at stellar encounters which are too weak to immediately destabilize a planetary system but are nevertheless strong enough…
In addition to its search for extra-solar planets, the NASA Kepler Mission provides exquisite data on stellar oscillations. We report the detections of oscillations in 500 solartype stars in the Kepler field of view, an ensemble that is…
Existing upper limits on variations in the photospheric radius of the Sun during the solar magnetic activity cycle are at a fractional amplitude of 2x10^{-4}. At that level, the transit duration of a close-in planet around a Sun-like star…
Nearby masses can have a high probability of lensing stars in a distant background field. High-probability lensing, or mesolensing, can therefore be used to dramatically increase our knowledge of dark and dim objects in the solar…
The recent years have witnessed a carnival of discoveries in the Outer Solar System. Here we provide evidence from numerical simulations of orbital stability to suggest the possible existence of two long lived belts of primordial…
The discrepancy of the Hubble parameter H0 as measured from the cosmic microwave background versus that found from traditional distance ladder measurements has produced considerable discussion about the need for another force in cosmology.…
We examine the possibility of detecting signatures of surviving Uranus-Neptune-like planets inside planetary nebulae. Planets that are not too close to the stars, orbital separation larger than about 5 AU, are likely to survive the entire…
Planetary nebulae are now well established as probes of galaxy dynamics and as standard candles in distance determinations. Motivated by the need to improve the efficiency of planetary nebulae searches and the speed with which their radial…
The light from a source at a distance d will arrive at detectors separated by 100 AU at times that differ by as much as 120 (d/100 Mpc)^{-1} nanoseconds because of the curvature of the wavefront. At gigahertz frequencies, the arrival time…
The imaging of disks around young stars presents extreme challenges in high dynamic range, angular resolution, and sensitivity. Recent instrumental advances have met these challenges admirably, leading to a marked increase in imaging…