Related papers: Bounding the Photon Mass with Solar Probes
Satellite formation is a natural by-product of planet formation. With the discovery of nu- merous extrasolar planets, it is likely that moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) will soon be discovered. Some of the most promising techniques…
Recently, Teachey, Kipping, and Schmitt (2018) reported the detection of a candidate exomoon, tentatively designated Kepler-1625b I, around a giant planet in the Kepler field. The candidate exomoon would be about the size and mass of…
The use of four Lagrange points of the Sun/Earth system for fundamental physics experiments in space is presented. L1, L2, L4 and L5 rotating rigidly together with the Earth form a natural reference frame at the scale of the inner solar…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are attracting increasing interest since, among other things, they are a prediction of many extensions of the standard model of elementary particles physics and in particular of superstrings and superbranes.…
The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and Solar Orbiter missions are designed to make groundbreaking observations of the Sun and interplanetary space within this decade. We show that a particularly interesting in situ observation of an…
We propose a strategy for searching for isolated stellar mass black holes in the solar neighborhood with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Due to spherical accretion of the inter-stellar medium and the ambient magnetic field, an isolated black…
We report the discovery of a cold planet with a very low planet/host mass ratio of $q=(4.09\pm0.27) \times 10^{-5}$, which is similar to the ratio of Uranus/Sun ($q=4.37 \times 10^{-5}$) in the Solar system. The Bayesian estimates for the…
We propose a possibility to improve the current precision measurements on compact binaries. When the orbital axis is almost perpendicular to our line of sight, a pulsar behind its companion can form two strong-lensing images. These images…
We discuss the problems (and the promise) of the ingenious method introduced by Lakes, and recently improved on by Luo, to detect a possible small photon mass $\mu$ by measuring the ambient magnetic vector potential from large scale…
Recently, the PVLAS collaboration has reported evidence for an anomalously large rotation of the polarization of light generated in vacuum in the presence of a transverse magnetic field. This may be explained through the production of a new…
Axion helioscopes search for solar axions and axion-like particles via inverse Primakoff conversion in strong laboratory magnets pointed at the Sun. Anticipating the detection of solar axions, we determine the potential for the planned…
Pulsars are magnetized rotating compact objects. They spin down due to magnetic dipole radiation and wind emission. If photon has a nonzero mass, the spin down rate would be smaller than the zero mass case. We show that an upper limit of…
Dark photon as an ultralight dark matter candidate can interact with the Standard Model particles via kinetic mixing. We propose to search for the ultralight dark photon dark matter using radio telescopes with solar observations. The dark…
High-resolution spectroscopic searches for the starlight reflected from close-in extra-solar giant planets have the capability of determining the optical albedo spectra and scattering properties of these objects. When combined with radial…
We use the plasma density based on measurements of the probe-to-spacecraft potential in combination with magnetic field measurements by MAG to study fields and density fluctuations in the solar wind observed by Solar Orbiter during the…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
We perform ideal-magnetohydrodynamic axisymmetric simulations of magnetically confined mountains on an accreting neutron star, with masses less than ~0.12 solar masses. We consider two scenarios, in which the mountain sits atop a hard…
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) experiment searches for solar axions by the "helioscope" method. First results imply an upper limit on the axion-photon coupling of g_a-gamma < 1.16 x 10^-10 GeV^-1 (95% CL) for m_a < 0.02 eV, in this…
The ultraviolet (UV) window has been largely unexplored through balloons for astronomy. We discuss here the development of a compact near-UV spectrograph with fiber optics input for balloon ights. It is a modified Czerny-Turner system built…
There are hints of a novel object ("Planet 9") with a mass $5-10$ $M_\oplus$ in the outer Solar System, at a distance of order 500 AU. If it is a relatively conventional planet, it can be found in telescopic searches. Alternatively, it has…