In this review, we describe the physical processes driving the dynamical evolution of binary stars, namely the circularization of the orbit and the synchronization of their spin and orbital rotation. We also discuss the possible role of the elliptic instability which turns out to be an unavoidable ingredient of the evolution of binary stars.

Remote observations of solar light scattered by dust in comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko coma are of major importance to assess the properties of the dust and thus to prepare the rendezvous of the Rosetta spacecraft with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We present polarimetric data obtained from India in December 2008 and France in March 2009. Compared with previous observations of this comet and...

Gravitational collapse is one of the most fruitful subjects in gravitational physics. It is well known that singularity formation is inevitable in complete gravitational collapse. It was conjectured that such a singularity should be hidden by horizons if it is formed from generic initial data with physically reasonable matter fields. Many possible counterexamples to this conjecture have been pr...

The study of formation and evolution of galaxies is reviewed, with emphasis on the physical factors which are important to understand the origin of the Hubble sequence. We concentrate on predictions of the hierarchical Cold Dark Matter (CDM) scenario and their confrontation with observations. The mass assembling of the CDM halos, the baryonic processes within them, and the evolution of disks an...

The radio/optical alignment effect for small powerful radio galaxies has been shown to be produced by shock waves formed by the interaction of the head of the jet and/or cocoon with clouds embedded in the interstellar/intergalactic medium. We present here preliminary results of analytical and numerical solutions that have been made to account for the production of implosive shock waves induced ...

We study physical processes that affect the alignment of grains subject to radiative torques (RATs). To describe the action of the RATs we use the analytical model (AMO) of RATs introduced in Paper I, namely, in Lazarian & Hoang (2007). We focus our discussion on the RAT alignment by anisotropic radiation flux in respect to magnetic field. The latter defines the axis of grain Larmor precession....

Processes are central for geographic information science; yet geographic information systems (GIS) lack capabilities to represent process related information. A prerequisite to including processes in GIS software is a general method to describe geographic processes independently of application disciplines. This paper presents such a method, namely a process description language. The vocabulary ...

Making a prediction for a chaotic physical process involves specifying the probability associated with each possible outcome. Ensembles of solutions are frequently used to estimate this probability distribution. However, for a typical chaotic physical system and model of that system, no solution of remains close to for all time. We propose an alternative. This Letter shows how to inflate or sys...