Recent meteoritical analyses support an initial abundance of the short-lived radioisotope (SLRI) Fe-60 that may be high enough to require nucleosynthesis in a core-collapse supernova, followed by rapid incorporation into primitive meteoritical components, rather than a scenario where such isotopes were inherited from a well-mixed region of a giant molecular cloud polluted by a variety of supernovae remnants and massive star winds. This paper continues to explore the former scenario, by calculating three-dimensional, adaptive mesh refinement, hydrodynamical code (FLASH 2.5) models of the self-gravitational, dynamical collapse of a molecular cloud core that has been struck by a thin shock front with a speed of 40 km s(-1), leading to the injection of shock front matter into the collapsing cloud through the formation of Rayleigh-Taylor fingers at the shock-cloud intersection. These models extend the previous work into the nonisothermal collapse regime using a polytropic approximation to represent compressional heating in the optically thick protostar. The models show that the injection efficiencies of shock front materials are enhanced compared to previous models, which were not carried into the nonisothermal regime, and so did not reach such high densities. The new models, combined with the recent estimates of initial Fe-60 abundances, imply that the supernova triggering and injection scenario remains a plausible explanation for the origin of the SLRIs involved in the formation of our solar system.

Transit photometry of the M8V dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 (2MASS J23062928-0502285) has revealed the presence of at least seven planets with masses and radii similar to that of Earth, orbiting at distances that might allow liquid water to be present on their surfaces. We have been following TRAPPIST-1 since 2011 with the CAPSCam astrometric camera on the 2.5 m du Pont telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. In 2016, we noted that TRAPPIST-1 lies slightly farther away than previously thought, at 12.49 pc, rather than 12.1 pc. Here, we examine 15 epochs of CAPSCam observations of TRAPPIST-1, spanning the five years from 2011 to 2016, and obtain a revised trigonometric distance of 12.56 +/- 0.12 pc. The astrometric data analysis pipeline shows no evidence for a long-period astrometric wobble of TRAPPIST-1. After proper motion and parallax are removed, residuals at the level of +/- 1.3 mas remain. The amplitude of these residuals constrains the masses of any long-period gas giant planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system: no planet more massive than similar to 4.6M(Jup) orbits with a 1 year period, and no planet more massive than similar to 1.6 M-Jup orbits with a 5 year period. Further refinement of the CAPSCam data analysis pipeline, combined with continued CAPSCam observations, should either detect any long-period planets, or put an even tighter constraint on these mass upper limits.

Upper Scorpius is a subgroup of the nearest OB association, Scorpius-Centaurus. Its young age makes it an important association to study star and planet formation. We present parallaxes to 52 low-mass stars in Upper Scorpius, 28 of which have full kinematics. We measure ages of the individual stars by combining our measured parallaxes with pre-main-sequence evolutionary tracks. We find a significant difference in the ages of stars with and without circumstellar disks. The stars without disks have a mean age of 4.9 +/- 0.8 Myr and those with disks have an older mean age of 8.2 +/- 0.9 Myr. This somewhat counterintuitive result suggests that evolutionary effects in young stars can dominate their apparent ages. We also attempt to use the 28 stars with full kinematics (i.e., proper motion, radial velocity (RV), and parallax) to trace the stars back in time to their original birthplace to obtain a trackback age. As expected, given the large measurement uncertainties on available RV measurements, we find that measurement uncertainties alone cause the group to diverge after a few Myr.

We report individual dynamical masses for the brown dwarfs e Indi B and C, which have spectral types of T1.5 and T6, respectively, measured from astrometric orbit mapping. Our measurements are based on a joint analysis of astrometric data from the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory Parallax Investigation, as well as archival high-resolution imaging, and use a Markov chain Monte Carlo method. We find dynamical masses of 75.0 +/- 0.82M(Jup) for the T1.5 B component and 70.1 +/- 0.68M(Jup) for the T6 C component. These masses are surprisingly high for. such cool objects and challenge our understanding of substellar structure and evolution. We discuss several evolutionary scenarios proposed in the literature and find that while none of them can provide conclusive explanations for the high substellar masses, evolutionary models incorporating lower atmospheric opacities come closer to approximating our results. We discuss the details of our astrometric model, its algorithm implementation, and how we determine parameter values via Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian inference.

Cosmochemical evaluations of the initial meteoritical abundance of the short-lived radioisotope (SLRI) Al-26 have remained fairly constant since 1976, while estimates for the initial abundance of the SLRI Fe-60 have varied widely recently. At the high end of this range, Fe-60 initial abundances have seemed to require Fe-60 nucleosynthesis in a core-collapse supernova, followed by incorporation into primitive meteoritical components within similar to 1 Myr. This paper continues the detailed exploration of this classical scenario, using models of the self-gravitational collapse of molecular cloud cores that have been struck by suitable shock fronts, leading to the injection of shock front gas into the collapsing cloud through Rayleigh-Taylor fingers formed at the shock-cloud interface. As before, these models are calculated using the FLASH three-dimensional, adaptive mesh refinement, gravitational hydrodynamical code. While the previous models used FLASH 2.5, the new models employ FLASH 4.3, which allows sink particles to be introduced to represent the newly formed protostellar object. Sink particles permit the models to be pushed forward farther in time to the phase where a similar to 1 M-circle dot protostar has formed, orbited by a rotating protoplanetary disk. These models are thus able to define what type of target cloud core is necessary for the supernova triggering scenario to produce a plausible scheme for the injection of SLRIs into the presolar cloud core: a similar to 3 M-circle dot cloud core rotating at a rate of similar to 3. x. 10(-14) rad s-1 or higher.

The ability to make independent detections of the signatures of exoplanets with complementary telescopes and instruments brings a new potential for robust identification of exoplanets and precision characterization. We introduce PEXO, a package for Precise EXOplanetology to facilitate the efficient modeling of timing, astrometry, and radial velocity data, which will benefit not only exoplanet science but also various astrophysical studies in general. PEXO is general enough to account for binary motion and stellar reflex motions induced by planetary companions and is precise enough to treat various relativistic effects both in the solar system and in the target system. We also model the post-Newtonian barycentric motion for future tests of general relativity in extrasolar systems. We benchmark PEXO with the pulsar timing package TEMPO2 and find that PEXO produces numerically similar results with timing precision of about 1 ns, space-based astrometry to a precision of 1 mu as, and radial velocity of 1 mu m s(-1) and improves on TEMPO2 for decade-long timing data of nearby targets, due to its consideration of third-order terms of Roemer delay. PEXO is able to avoid the bias introduced by decoupling the target system and the solar system and to account for the atmospheric effects that set a practical limit for ground-based radial velocities close to 1 cm s(-1). Considering the various caveats in barycentric correction and ancillary data Required to realize cm s(-1) modeling, we recommend the preservation of original observational data. The PEXO modeling package is available at GitHub (https://github.com/phillippro/pexo) and Zenodo (Feng et al. 2019).

Observational evidence suggests that gas disk instability may be responsible for the formation of at least some gas giant exoplanets, particularly massive or distant gas giants. With regard to close-in gas giants, Boss used the beta cooling approximation to calculate hydrodynamical models of inner gas disk instability, finding that provided disks with low values of the initial minimum Toomre stability parameter (i.e., Q(i) < 2 inside 20 au) form, fragmentation into self-gravitating clumps could occur even for beta as high as 100 (i.e., extremely slow cooling). Those results implied that the evolution of disks toward low Q(i) must be taken into account. This paper presents such models: initial disk masses of 0.091 M-circle dot extending from 4 to 20 au around a 1Me protostar, with a range (1-100) of beta cooling parameters, the same as in Boss, but with all the disks starting with Q(i) = 2.7, i.e., gravitationally stable, and allowed to cool from their initial outer disk temperature of 180 K to as low as 40 K. All the disks eventually fragment into at least one dense clump. The clumps were again replaced by virtual protoplanets (VPs) and the masses and orbits of the resulting ensemble of VPs compare favorably with those of Boss, supporting the claim that disk instability can form gas giants rapidly inside 20 au, provided that sufficiently massive protoplanetary disks exist.

Initial release.

Several observations suggest that the Solar system has been located in a region affected by massive stellar feedback for at least a few Myr; these include detection of live Fe-60 in deep-sea archives and Antarctic snow, the broad angular distribution of Al-26 around the Galactic plane seen in all-sky gamma-ray maps, and the all-sky soft X-ray background. However, our position inside the Galactic disc makes it difficult to fully characterize this environment, and our limited time baseline provides no information about its formation history or relation to large-scale galactic dynamics. We explore these questions by using an N-body + hydrodynamics simulation of a Milky-Way-like galaxy to identify stars on Sun-like orbits whose environments would produce conditions consistent with those we observe. We find that such stars are uncommon but not exceptionally rare. These stars are found predominantly near the edges of spiral arms, and lie inside kpc-scale bubbles that are created by multiple generations of star formation in the arm. We investigate the stars' trajectories and find that the duration of the stay in the bubble ranges from 20 to 90 Myr. The duration is governed by the crossing time of stars across the spiral arm. This is generally shorter than the bubble lifetime, which is similar to 100 Myr as a result of the continuous gas supply provided by the arm environment.

Solar-type young stellar objects undergo periodic, energetic outbursts that appear to be the result of enhanced mass accretion driven by the gravitational instability of their disks. Such FU Orionis outbursts may have profound consequences for the earliest solids in a protoplanetary disk, namely the refractory inclusions containing abundant calcium and aluminum (CAIs). We present models of the orbital evolution of centimeter-radius particles representing large CAIs in marginally gravitationally unstable disks. The hydrodynamical evolution of the disks is calculated with a fully three-dimensional code, including compressional heating and cooling in the beta cooling approximation. The particles are initially distributed uniformly throughout the disk, which extends from 1 to 10 au around a solar-mass protostar, but within similar to 100 yr the particles are concentrated by gas drag into regions surrounding the spiral arms and rings formed by the gas disk. The particles settle down toward the disk midplane, only to be lofted repeatedly upward by shock fronts. Large-scale radial transport both outward and inward occurs, with significant numbers of particles reaching the outer disk (similar to 10 au) and surviving for considerably longer times than would be the case in a quiescent disk with gas pressure monotonically decreasing with distance from the protostar. Individual particles experience wide ranges of disk temperatures during their journeys, ranging from 60 K in the outer disk to nearly 2000 K in spiral features. Future work will consider the implications for CAI rims of the thermochemical processing experienced during FU Orionis outbursts.