Related papers: Dust cloud lightning in extraterrestrial atmospher…
In the light of the recent and unexpected discovery of a brand new type of white dwarfs, those with carbon-dominated atmospheres, we examine the asteroseismological potential of such stars. The motivation behind this is based on the…
The upper atmospheres of the planets and their satellites are more directly exposed to sunlight and solar wind particles than the surface or the deeper atmospheric layers. At the altitudes where the associated energy is deposited, the…
The planets of our solar system formed from a gas-dust disk. However, there are some properties of the solar system that are peculiar in this context. First, the cumulative mass of all objects beyond Neptune (TNOs) is only a fraction of…
The atmospheres within our Solar System can be categorized into four distinct climate regimes: "terrestrial", "Jovian", "condensable", and "exosphere". Beyond the three terrestrial planets (excluding Mercury) and the four giant planets,…
Events which meet certain criteria from star tracker images onboard the Juno spacecraft have been proposed to be due to interplanetary dust particle impacts on its solar arrays. These events have been suggested to be caused by particles…
Atmospheres regulate the planetary heat loss and therefore influence planetary thermal evolution. Uncertainty in a giant planet's thermal state contributes to the uncertainty in the inferred abundance of heavy elements it contains. Within…
I review the major open science questions in exoplanet atmospheres. These are mainly focused in the areas of understanding atmospheric physics, the atmosphere as a window into other realms of planetary physics, and the atmosphere is a…
Outflows of pre-main-sequence stars drive shocks into molecular material within 0.01 - 1 pc of the young stars. The shock-heated gas emits infrared, millimeter and submillimeter lines of many species including. Dust grains are important…
A novel mechanism of the formation of compact dusty clouds in astrophysical environments is discussed. It is shown that the balance of collective forces operating in space dusty plasmas can result in the effect of dust self-confinement,…
Strong ionization on close-in extrasolar giant planets suggests that their atmospheres may be affected by ion drag and resistive heating arising from wind-driven electrodynamics. Recent models of ion drag on these planets, however, are…
Galactic dust constitutes approximately half of the elements more massive than helium produced in stellar nucleosynthesis. Notwithstanding the formation of dust grains in the dense, cool atmospheres of late-type stars, there still remain…
Dust formation in the winds of hot stars is inextricably linked to the classic eruptive state of luminous blue variables (LBVs) because it requires very high mass loss rates, Mdot>10^(-2.5) Msun/year, for grains to grow and for the non-dust…
The temperature of newly forming dust is controlled by the radiation field. As dust forms around stars, stellar transients, quasars or supernovae, the grains must grow through a regime where they are stochastically heated by individual…
Theoretical arguments and observations suggest that the atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs and planets are very dynamic on chemical and on physical time scales. The modelling of such substellar atmospheres has, hence, been much more demanding than…
Modelling of Extreme Scattering Events suggests that the Galaxy's dark matter is an undetected population of cold, AU-sized, planetary-mass gas clouds. None of the direct observational constraints on this picture -- thermal/non-thermal…
Recent optical and submillimeter observations have begun to probe the existence of dust grains in the halos of spiral galaxies. I review our own work in this area which employs high-resolution optical images of edge-on spiral galaxies to…
The interaction of dust grains originating from the local interstellar cloud with the environment inside the heliosphere is investigated. As a consequence of this interaction the spatial distribution of interstellar dust grains changes with…
We study the stability of charged dust grains orbiting a planet and subject to gravity and the electromagnetic force. Our numerical models cover a broad range of launch distances from the planetary surface to beyond synchronous orbit, and…
Planets embedded within debris disks gravitationally perturb nearby dust and can create clumpy, azimuthally asymmetric circumstellar ring structures that rotate in lock with the planet. The Earth creates one such structure in the solar…
Production of runaway electron avalanches and gamma rays originating inside Martian dust storms are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. In the absence of in situ measurements, we use theoretical predictions of electric fields inside dust…