Related papers: Ejecta Exchange, Color Evolution in the Pluto Syst…
The New Horizons spacecraft has found evidence for geologic activity on the surface of Pluto, including extensional tectonic deformation of its water ice bedrock (see Moore et al., 2016). One mechanism that could drive extensional tectonic…
How did Pluto's recently discovered minor moons form? Ward and Canup propose an elegant solution in which Nix and Hydra formed in the collision that produced Charon, then were caught into corotation resonances with Charon, and finally were…
Physical conditions in the atmospheres of tidally-locked, slowly-rotating hot Jupiters correspond to dynamical circulation regimes with Rhines scales and Rossby deformation radii comparable to the planetary radii. Consequently, the large…
In the Solar System, minor bodies and dust deliver various materials to planetary surfaces. Several exoplanetary systems are known to host inner and outer belts, analogues of the main asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. We study the…
Debris discs are known to exist around many planet-host stars, but no debris dust has been found so far in systems with transiting planets. Using publicly available catalogues, we searched for infrared excesses in such systems. In the…
The discovery that many trans-neptunian objects exist in pairs, or binaries, is proving invaluable for shedding light on the formation, evolution and structure of the outer Solar system. Based on recent systematic searches it has been…
The Kepler satellite has revealed a gap between sub-Neptunes and super-Earths that atmospheric escape models had predicted as an evaporation valley. We seek to contrast results from a simple XUV-driven energy-limited (ELIM) escape model…
When transiting their host stars, hot Jupiters absorb about 10% of the light in the wings of the stellar Lyman-alpha emission line. The absorption occurs at wavelengths Doppler-shifted from line center by +/- 100 km/s - larger than the…
With JWST we can now characterize the atmospheres of planets on longer orbital planets, but this moves us into a regime where we cannot assume that tidal forces from the star have eroded planets' obliquities and synchronized their rotation…
The scattering of small bodies by planets is an important dynamical process in planetary systems. We present an analytical model to describe this process using the simplifying assumption that each particle's dynamics is dominated by a…
We present fully general-relativistic simulations of binary neutron star mergers with a temperature and composition dependent nuclear equation of state. We study the dynamical mass ejection from both quasi-circular and dynamical-capture…
We present a generic theoretical model for the structuring of a relativistic jet propagating through the ejecta of a binary neutron star merger event, introducing the effects of the neutron conversion-diffusion, which provides a baryon flux…
The signal from a transiting planet can be diluted by astrophysical contamination. In the case of circumstellar debris disks, this contamination could start in the mid-infrared and vary as a function of wavelength, which would then change…
New Horizons mission observations show that the small satellites Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, of the Pluto-Charon system, have not tidally spun-down to near synchronous spin states and have high obliquities with respect to their orbit…
Granular material that is bound by the low gravity of a small asteroid is mobilized by slow velocity impacts. These splashes generated by impacts might play an important role in sculpting the asteroid's surface. In laboratory experiments we…
Neutron star mergers eject neutron-rich matter in which heavy elements are synthesised. The decay of these freshly synthesised elements powers electromagnetic transients ("macronovae" or "kilonovae") whose luminosity and colour strongly…
With the number of confirmed rocky exoplanets increasing steadily, their characterisation and the search for exoplanetary biospheres is becoming an increasingly urgent issue in astrobiology. We aim to investigate the possibility of…
Regolith on Mars exchanges water with the atmosphere on a diurnal basis and this process causes significant variation in the abundance of water vapor at the surface. While previous studies of regolith-atmosphere exchange focus on the…
NASA's New Horizons (NH) Pluto-Kuiper belt (PKB) mission was launched on 19 January 2006 on a Jupiter Gravity Assist (JGA) trajectory toward the Pluto system for a 14 July 2015 closest approach; Jupiter closest approach occurred on 28…
General-relativistic simulations of binary neutron star mergers with viscosity reveal a new outflow mechanism operating in unequal mass binaries on dynamical timescales and enabled by turbulent viscosity. These "viscous-dynamical" ejecta…