Related papers: Artificial ozone holes
The classical habitable zone is the circular region around a star in which liquid water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. The outer edge of the traditional N2-CO2-H2O habitable zone (HZ) extends out to nearly 1.7 AU in our Solar…
By plotting empirical chemical element abundances on Earth relative to the Sun and normalized to silicon versus their first ionization potentials, we confirm the existence of a correlation reported earlier. To explain this, we develop a…
Is the Sun likely to have a more opaque interior than previously thought? The solar oxygen (or abundance) problem can be solved with higher interior opacities, reconciling abundance analyses based on 3D convective atmospheres with the…
Determining the atmospheric structure and chemical composition of an exoplanet remains a formidable goal. Fortunately, advancements in the study of exoplanets and their atmospheres have come in the form of direct imaging - spatially…
Pluto has a heterogeneous surface, despite a global haze deposition rate of ~1 micrometer per orbit (Cheng et al., 2017; Grundy et al., 2018). While there could be spatial variation in the deposition rate, this has not yet been rigorously…
According to theory, high energy emission from the coronae of cool stars can severely erode the atmosphere of orbiting planets. To test the long term effects of the erosion we study a large sample of planet-hosting stars observed in X-rays.…
The habitable zone (HZ) is the circular region around a star(s) where standing bodies of water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Space missions employ the HZ to select promising targets for follow-up habitability assessment. The…
Using smoothed particle hydrodynamics we model giant impacts of Super-Earth mass rocky planets between an atmosphere-less projectile and an atmosphere-rich target. In this work we present results from head-on to grazing collisions. The…
Protoplanetary disks start their lives with a dust free inner region where the temperatures are higher than the sublimation temperature of solids. As the star illuminates the innermost particles, which are immersed in gas at the sublimation…
We consider a primordial black hole of very high mass, $10^9-10^{10}M_\odot$, surrounded by dark matter and barionic halo at redshifts $z\sim20$ without any local sources of energy release. Such heavy and concentrated objects in the early…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
We propose theoretical schemes to realize the cyon and anyon by atoms which possess non-vanishing electric dipole moments. To realize a cyon, besides the atom, we need a magnetic field produced by a long magnetic-charged filament. To…
Extinction of light by material particles stems from losses incurred by absorption or scattering. The extinction cross section is usually treated as an additive quantity, leading to the exponential laws that govern the macroscopic…
In this paper we study the formation of microbubbles upon the irradiation of an array of plasmonic Au nanoparticles with a laser in n-alkanes ($C_{n}H_{2n+2}$, with n = 5-10). Two different phases in the evolution of the bubbles can be…
(abridged abstract) Theoretical arguments indicate that close-in terrestial exoplanets may have weak magnetic fields. As described in the companion article (Paper I), a weak magnetic field results in a high flux of galactic cosmic rays to…
If dark matter particle can be decelerated due to its dissipative self scattering, except for sinking at the galaxy scale to speed up structure formation, it can also be accreted onto local celestial bodies such as the Sun, forming a…
Circumbinary planets have been observed at orbital radii where binary perturbations may have significant effects on the gas disk structure, on planetesimal velocity dispersion, and on the coupling between turbulence and planetesimals. Here,…
The photochemical haze produced in the upper atmosphere of Titan plays a key role in various atmospheric and surface processes on Titan. The surface energy, one important physical properties of the haze, is crucial for understanding the…
Halos with masses in excess of the atomic limit are believed to be ideal environments in which to form heavy black hole seeds with masses above 10^3 Msun. In cases where the H_2 fraction is suppressed this is expected to lead to reduced…
Haze in Pluto's atmosphere was detected in images by both the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on New Horizons. LORRI observed haze up to altitudes of at least 200 km above Pluto's…