相关论文: IAU Planet Definition: Some Confusions and Their M…
The Art, Astronomy, Technology and Society (AATS) project is an artscience collaboration which dwells in the inbetweenness layer of scientific understanding of the origins of planets and the embodied, intuited ways of knowing. One of the…
In astronomical and cosmological studies one often wishes to infer some properties of an infinite-dimensional field indexed within a finite-dimensional metric space given only a finite collection of noisy observational data. Bayesian…
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…
Detection and orbit determination for thousands of planets with periods up to about 40 years would be obtained by astrometry from two Gaia-like missions, results which cannot be obtained by any other mission, planned or proposed. A billion…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
The twin Pioneer spacecraft have been tracked for over thirty years as they headed out of the solar system. After passing 20 AU from the Sun, both exhibited a systematic error in their trajectories that can be interpreted as a constant…
The Universe is a physical object. Physical objects have shapes and sizes. General relativity is insufficient to describe the global shape and size of the Universe: the Hilbert-Einstein equations only treat limiting quantities towards an…
We report on research carried out to improve teaching and student engagement in the introductory astronomy course at the University of Cape Town. This course is taken by a diverse range of students, including many from educationally…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
We present a Bayesian method for the identification and classification of objects from sets of astronomical catalogs, given a predefined classification scheme. Identification refers here to the association of entries in different catalogs…
We present the results of realistic end-to-end simulations of observations of nearby stars with the proposed global astrometry mission GAIA, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program. We…
It has been 20 years since planning began for the 1995 United Nations International Conference on Near-Earth Objects. The conference proceedings established the scientific basis for an international organizational framework to support…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
About half of all known stellar systems with Sun-like stars consist of two or more stars, significantly affecting the orbital stability of any planet in these systems. Here we study the onset of instability for an Earth-type planet that is…
The determination of atmospheric parameters is the first and most fundamental step in the analysis of a stellar spectrum. Current and forthcoming surveys involve samples of up to several million stars, and therefore fully automated…
We present the notion of orbit decidability into a more general framework, exploring interesting generalizations and variations of this algorithmic problem. A recent theorem by Bogopolski-Martino-Ventura gave a renovated protagonism to this…
As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…
During the formation of our solar system, a large number of planetesimals were ejected into interstellar space by gravitational encounters with the planets. Debris disks observations and numerical simulations indicate that many other…
The Gaia mission is described, along with its scientific potential and its updated science perfomances. Although it is often described as a self-calibrated mission, Gaia still needs to tie part of its measurements to external scales (or to…
GAIA (originally the acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) which will make the largest, most precise three dimensional map of our Galaxy by an unparalleled survey of…