相关论文: The stability in the most external region of the O…
Galaxy interactions expel a significant amount of stars and gas into the surrounding environment. I review the formation and evolution of the tidal debris spawned during these collisions, and describe how this evolution depends on the large…
We use N-body simulations to explore the influence of orbital eccentricity on the dynamical evolution of star clusters. Specifically we compare the mass loss rate, velocity dispersion, relaxation time, and the mass function of star clusters…
This thesis assesses the influence of astronomical phenomena on the Earth's biosphere and climate. I examine in particular the relevance of both the path of the Sun through the Galaxy and the evolution of the Earth's orbital parameters in…
Context: Increasingly, Oort Cloud comets are being discovered at great distances from the Sun and tracked over ever wider ranges of heliocentric distances as observational equipment improves. Aims: To investigate in detail how the original…
The orbital evolution and stability of planetary systems with interaction from the belts is studied using the standard phase-plane analysis. In addition to the fixed point which corresponds to the Keplerian orbit, there are other fixed…
This review concentrates almost entirely on globular star clusters. It emphasises the increasing realisation that few of the traditional problems of star cluster astronomy can be studied in isolation: the influence of the Galaxy affects…
The Oort cloud and the scattered disk are the two primary reservoirs for long-period and short-period comets, respectively. In this review, we assess the known observational constraints on these reservoirs' properties and their formation.…
The discovery of many giant planets in close-in orbits and the effect of planetary and stellar tides in their subsequent orbital decay have been extensively studied in the context of planetary formation and evolution theories. Planets…
As a stellar group forms within its parent molecular cloud, new members first appear in the deep interior. These overcrowded stars continually diffuse outward to the cloud boundary, and even beyond. Observations have so far documented only…
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way…
After their initial formation, disk galaxies are observed to be rotationally stable over periods of >6 Gyr, implying that any large velocity disturbances of stars and gas clouds are damped rapidly on the timescale of their rotation.…
The majority of Milky Way extrasolar planets likely reside within a few kpc of the Galactic centre. The Galactic tidal forces acting on planets scale inversely with radius in the Galaxy and so are much greater in the inner Galaxy than in…
Recent studies have shown that ocean dynamics can have a significant warming effect on the permanent night sides of 1 to 1 tidally locked terrestrial exoplanets with Earth-like atmospheres and oceans in the middle of the habitable zone.…
It is possible that the formation of the Oort Cloud dates back to the earliest epochs of solar system history. At that time, the Sun was almost certainly a member of the stellar cluster, where it was born. Since the solar birth cluster is…
Mounting discoveries of extrasolar planets orbiting post-main sequence stars motivate studies aimed at understanding the fate of these planets. In the traditional "adiabatic" approximation, a secondary's eccentricity remains constant during…
A numerical simulation of the Oort cloud is used to explain the observed orbital distributions and numbers of Jupiter-family and Halley-type short-period comets. Comets are given initial orbits with perihelion distances between 5 and 36 AU,…
Long-period comets observed in our solar system are believed to originate from the Oort cloud, which is estimated to extend from roughly a few thousand to $10^5$ AU from the Sun. Despite many theoretical arguments for its existence, no…
The existence of the Oort Comet Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, and plausible inefficiencies in planetary core formation, all suggest that there was once a residual planetesimal disk of mass 10-100 Earth-masses in the vicinity of the giant planets…
Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within ten million years, while others remain bound as stellar groupings for hundreds of millions to billions of years,…
Planet formation is accompanied by the formation of comet clouds. In systems where planets migrate on rapid timescales, the diffusive evolution of comet orbits may stall, resulting in a comet cloud intermediate between a flattened Kuiper…