Total solar irradiance, the spatially and spectrally integrated radiant output from the Sun at a mean Sun-Earth distance of 1 astronomical unit, provides nearly all the energy driving the Earth’s climate system. Variations in this energy, particularly over long time scales, contribute to changes in Earth’s climate and have been linked to historical glaciation and inter-glacial periods as well a...

Shine a flashlight on a black hole, and one is greeted with the return of a series of concentric rings of light. For a point source of light, and for perfect alignment of the lens, source, and observer, the rings are of infinite brightness (in the limit of geometric optics). In this manner, distant black holes can be revealed through their reflection of light from the Sun. Such retro-MACHO even...

The sun is often portrayed as a “laboratory for astrophysics” but it is a laboratory over which we have no control. Instead, solar physicists employ a wide range of theoretical, computational, and observational tools to study the magnetically driven activity on the sun. The challenge for these methods is that solar physics is extremely complex, making it difficult to isolate the key drivers of ...

From the last few decades, the space science community has shown considerable interest in missions which take place in the vicinity of the Lagrangian points in the restricted three-body problem (RTBP) of the Sun-Earth and the Earth-Moon systems [1]. Designing trajectories for these missions is a challenging task due to inadequacy of the conic approximations. The RTBP deals the situation where o...

From the last few decades, the space science community has shown considerable interest in missions which take place in the vicinity of the Lagrangian points in the restricted three-body problem (RTBP) of the Sun-Earth and the Earth-Moon systems [1]. Designing trajectories for these missions is a challenging task due to inadequacy of the conic approximations. The RTBP deals the situation where o...