Events

Seminar by Amir Siraj, Princeton

The distant Kuiper belt may encode the gravitational imprint of unseen planets, but interpreting its orbital architecture is notoriously hampered by complex, non-uniform survey footprints. We present a unified, bias-free framework for two complementary diagnostics of distant trans-Neptunian object (TNO) dynamics: (i) the mean plane traced by orbital angular-momentum directions and (ii) potential apsidal (perihelion) clustering traced by eccentricity-vector directions. Both analyses use conditional-likelihood constructions in which the on-sky selection function cancels, enabling measurements that are demonstrably insensitive to where surveys looked on the sky.

Host: David Kipping