Related papers: Evolution of an Early Titan Atmosphere: Comment
The deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H or 2H/1H) ratio of Martian atmospheric water (~6x standard mean ocean water, SMOW) is higher than that of known sources, requiring planetary enrichment. A recent measurement by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory…
Photochemical hazes are suspected to obscure molecular features, such as water, from detection in the transmission spectra of exoplanets with atmospheric temperatures < 800 K. The opacities of laboratory produced organic compounds (tholins)…
We present an analysis of the VIMS solar occultations dataset, which allows us to extract vertically resolved information on the characteristics of Titan's atmosphere between 100-700 km with a characteristic vertical resolution of 10 km.…
Weak interaction rates on titanium isotopes are important during the late phases of evolution of massive stars. A search was made for key titanium isotopes from available literature and a microscopic calculation of weak rates of these…
The evidence for abundant liquid water on early Mars despite the faint young Sun is a long-standing problem in planetary research. Here we present new ab initio spectroscopic and line-by-line climate calculations of the warming potential of…
Reconciling the geology of Mars with models of atmospheric evolution remains a major challenge. Martian geology is characterized by past evidence for episodic surface liquid water, and geochemistry indicating a slow and intermittent…
The hydrogen and water molecules respond very differently to the collisional-radiative processes taking place in planetary atmospheres. Naturally, the question arises whether H2O-rich atmospheres are more (or less) resilient to long-term…
The chemistry of planetary atmospheres containing molecular nitrogen as a major atmospheric component is strongly influenced by the reactions of atomic nitrogen. Although nitrogen atoms in their ground electronic state N(4S) are mostly…
The internal composition of sub-Neptunes remains a prominent unresolved question in exoplanetary science. We present a technique to place constraints on envelope mean molecular weight that utilises observations of escaping hydrogen or…
Understanding surface temperature is important for habitability. Recent work on Mars has found that the dependence of surface temperature on elevation (surface lapse rate) converges to zero in the limit of a thin CO2 atmosphere. However,…
The escape of hot O and C atoms from the present martian atmosphere during low and high solar activity conditions has been studied with a Monte-Carlo model. The model includes the initial energy distribution of hot atoms, elastic,…
On the basis of geological evidence, it is often stated that the early martian climate was warm enough for liquid water to flow on the surface thanks to the greenhouse effect of a thick atmosphere. We present 3D global climate simulations…
Motivated by the recent surge in interest concerning white dwarf (WD) planets, this work presents the first numerical exploration of WD-driven atmospheric escape, whereby the high-energy radiation from a hot/young WD can trigger the outflow…
Numerous solar system atmospheres possess aerosols including the characteristic organic hazes of Titan and Pluto. Haze particles substantially impact atmospheric temperatures structures and may provide organic material to the surface of a…
The helium absorption triplet at a wavelength of 10,833 \AA\ has been proposed as a way to probe the escaping atmospheres of exoplanets. Recently this feature was detected for the first time using Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3…
The Cassini/Composite InfraRed Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument has been observing the middle atmosphere of Titan over almost half a Saturnian year. We used the CIRS dataset processed through the up-to-date calibration pipeline to…
Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere.…
I report the results of a new set of calculations for the gravitational contraction of the proto-solar cloud to quantify the idea that Titan may be a captured moon of Saturn (Prentice 1981, 1984). It is proposed that Titan initially…
Interferometric observations of the atmosphere of Titan were performed with the Submillimeter Array on two nights in February 2004 to investigate the global average vertical distributions of several molecular species above the tropopause.…
Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) driven atmospheric escape is a key process in the atmospheric evolution of close-in exoplanets. In many evolutionary models, the energy-limited mass-loss rate with a constant efficiency (typically $\sim10\%$) is…