Related papers: The Cambrian impact hypothesis
Our solar system's path has recently been shown to potentially intersect dense interstellar clouds 2 and 7 million years ago: the Local Lynx of Cold Cloud and the edge of the Local Bubble. These clouds compressed the heliosphere, directly…
In this paper we consider the influence of transplanckian physics on the CMBR anisotropies produced by inflation. We consider a simple toy model that allows for analytic calculations and argue on general grounds, based on ambiguities in the…
Firestone (2014) asserted evidence for numerous (23) nearby (d<300 pc) supernovae within the Middle and Late Pleistocene. If true, this would have strong implications for the irradiation of the Earth; at this rate, mass extinction level…
Freshwater forcing from a retreating Antarctic Ice Sheet could have a wide range of impacts on future global climate. Here, we report on multi-century (present-2250) climate simulations performed using a fully coupled numerical model…
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to…
High obliquity planets represent potentially extreme limits of terrestrial climate, as they exhibit large seasonality, a reversed annual-mean pole-to-equator gradient of stellar heating, and novel cryospheres. A suite of 3-D global climate…
Based on theoretical and experimental consideration of the first (the Twomey effect) and second indirect aerosol effects the quasianalytic description of physical connection between the galactic cosmic rays intensity and the Earth's cloud…
Thermal history of the universe after big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is well understood both theoretically and observationally, and recent cosmological observations also begin to reveal the inflationary dynamics. However, the epoch between…
A set of idealized experiments are performed to analyze the competing effects of declining atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the opening of an ocean gateway, and varying orbital parameters. These forcing mechanisms, which influence the global…
The last phase transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics took place at the QCD scale $T\sim200$ MeV when the universe was about $t\sim10^{-5}$ seconds old and the Hubble radius was around 10 Km. In this paper, we…
Although our solar system features predominantly circular orbits, the exoplanets discovered so far indicate that this is the exception rather than the rule. This could have crucial consequences for exoplanet climates, both because eccentric…
Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for…
The formation of the solar system's terrestrial planets concluded with a period of giant impacts. Previous works examining the volatile loss caused by the impact shock in the moon-forming impact find atmospheric losses of at most 20-30 per…
The orbital regime of a terrestrial planet plays a significant role in shaping its atmospheric dynamics, climate, and hence potential habitability. The orbit is also likely to play a role in shaping the response of a planetary atmosphere to…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…
Passing stars (also called stellar flybys) have notable effects on the solar system's long-term dynamical evolution, injection of Oort cloud comets into the solar system, properties of trans-Neptunian objects, and more. Based on a…
An energy-balance model of global climate, which takes into account a nontrivial role of galactic cosmic rays, is developed. The model is described by the fold catastrophe equation relative to increment of temperature, where galactic cosmic…
The increasing frequency of global climate extremes has significantly impacted the terrestrial carbon cycle. Extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, and extreme precipitation pose serious threats to ecosystem carbon…
Traditional refrigeration technologies based on compression cycles of greenhouse gases pose serious threats to the environment and cannot be downscaled to electronic device dimensions. Solid-state cooling exploits the thermal response of…
We suggest that the "Big Bang" may be a result of the first-order phase transition driven by changing scalar curvature of the 4D space-time in expanding cold Universe, filled with nonlinear scalar field $\phi $ and neutral matter with…