In our Solar System, there is a clear divide between the terrestrial and giant planets. These two categories of planets formed and evolved separately, almost in isolation from each other. This was possible because Jupiter avoided migrating into the inner Solar System, most probably due to the presence of Saturn, and never acquired a large-eccentricity orbit, even during the phase of orbital ins...

Received ; accepted – 2 – ABSTRACT Theoretical predictions of Red Giant Branch stars' effective temperatures, colors, luminosities and surface chemical abundances are a necessary tool for the astrophysical interpretation of the visible–near infrared integrated light from unresolved stellar populations, the Color-Magnitude-Diagrams of resolved stellar clusters and galaxies, and spectroscopic det...

Material accreting on a neutron star can undergo rapid proton capture nucleosynthesis to produce a variety of nuclei up to mass numbers around 100. This complex rp ash then undergoes electron capture as it is buried to higher densities. We perform molecular dynamics simulations to determine how this material freezes to form new neutron star crust. In addition, from our simulations we calculate ...

We report high precision, high cadence photometric measurements of the star HD 209458, which is known from radial velocity measurements to have a planetary mass companion in a close orbit. We detect two separate transit events at times that are consistent with the radial velocity measurements. In both cases, the detailed shape of the transit curve due to both the limb darkening of the star and ...

We propose that the giant HI ring recently discovered by HIPASS for S0 galaxy NGC 1533 is formed by unequal-mass merging between gas-rich LSB (low surface brightness: “ghost”) galaxies and HSB disks. The NGC 1533 progenitor HSB spiral is transformed into a barred S0 during merging and the outer HI gas disk of the LSB is transformed into the giant HI ring. We also discuss two different possibili...

Giant planets orbiting stars other than the Sun are clearly detectable through precise radial-velocity measurements of the orbital reflex motion of the parent star. In the four years since the discovery 1 of the companion to the star 51 Peg, similar low-amplitude " Doppler star wobbles " have revealed the presence of some 20 planets orbiting nearby solar-type stars. Several of these newly-disco...

We present results of a population synthesis study aimed at examining the role of spin-kick alignment in producing a correlation between the spin period of the first-born neutron star and the orbital eccentricity of observed double neutron star binaries in the Galactic disk. We find spin-kick alignment to be compatible with the observed correlation, but not to alleviate the requirements for low...

The expressions for the turbulent pressure, equation of state and thermodynamic quantities taking account of turbulent pressure are derived in the framework of the mixing-length theory of convection. The numerical computations indicate that the turbulent pressure in the region close to the surface of a red giant or anAGB star can reach a value of 30-40 percent of the total pressure. A compariso...

We measure a tilt of 86± 6◦ between the sky projections of the rotation axis of the WASP-7 star, and the orbital axis of its close-in giant planet. This measurement is based on observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect with the Planet Finder Spectrograph on the Magellan II telescope. The result conforms with the previously noted pattern among hot-Jupiter hosts, namely, that the hosts ...