Related papers: Methane clathrates in the Solar System
The origin of Mercury's anomalous core and low FeO surface mineralogy are outstanding questions in planetary science. Mercury's composition may result from cosmochemical controls on the precursor solids that accreted to form Mercury. High…
Geochemical and astronomical evidence demonstrate that planet formation occurred in two spatially and temporally separated reservoirs. The origin of this dichotomy is unknown. We use numerical models to investigate how the evolution of the…
Earth's tectonic processes regulate the formation of continental crust, control its unique deep water and carbon cycles, and are vital to its surface habitability. A major driver of steady-state plate tectonics on Earth is the sinking of…
We present experimental constraints on the insertion of oxygen atoms into methane to form methanol in astrophysical ice analogs. In gas-phase and theoretical studies this process has previously been demonstrated to have a very low or…
Methanol is a potentially important impurity in subsurface oceans on Titan and Enceladus. We report measurements of the freezing of methanol-water samples at pressures up to 350~MPa using a volumetric cell with sapphire windows. For low…
The Ice Giants Uranus and Neptune have hydrogen-based atmospheres with several constituents that condense in their cold upper atmospheres. A small number of bright cloud systems observed in both planets are good candidates for moist…
Methanol ice is embedded in interstellar ice mantles present in dense molecular clouds. We aim to measure the sputtering efficiencies starting from different ice mantles of varying compositions experimentally, in order to evaluate their…
Freeze-out of the gas phase elements onto cold grains in dense interstellar and circumstellar media builds up ice mantles consisting of molecules that are mostly formed in situ (H2O, NH3, CO2, CO, CH3OH, and more). This review summarizes…
The past decade has seen major progress in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation. Yet key questions remain. In this review we first address the growth of 100 km-scale planetesimals as a consequence of dust coagulation and…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
The migration of U and Th inside a planet is controlled by its oxidation state imposed by the volatile composition. In the deep interior of a planet, an absence of oxidative volatiles will cause U and Th to stay in a state of metal or low…
Comets are believed to be born in the outer Solar System where the temperature is assumed to have never exceeded T ~ 100 K. Surprisingly, observations and samples of cometary dust particles returned to Earth showed that they are in fact…
It is not yet entirely clear whether Mars began as a warm and wet planet that evolved towards the present-day cold and dry body or if it always was cold and dry with just some sporadic episodes of liquid water on its surface. An important…
The Red Planet has fascinated humans for millennia, especially for the last few centuries, and particularly during the Space Age. The nagging suspicion of extant Martian life is both fed by, and drives the many space missions to Mars and…
It is likely that at least some planetary nebulae are composed of matter which was ejected from a binary star system during common-envelope (CE) evolution. For these planetary nebulae the ionizing component is the hot and luminous remnant…
Biomolecules can be synthesized in interstellar ice grains subject to UV radiation and cosmic rays. I show that on time scales of $\gtrsim 10^{6}$ years, these processes lead to the formation of large percolation clusters of organic…
Our Solar System originated in interstellar gas and dust; the latter is in the form of amorphous silicate particles and carbonaceous dust. The composition of cometary material shows that a significant fraction of the amorphous silicates was…
In view of the many recent observations conducted by ALMA and SPHERE, it is becoming clear that protoplanetary disks form planets in narrow annular gaps at various distances from the central protostars before these protostars are actually…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
Inside carbonaceous chondrite meteorites are tiny dust particles which, when heated, release noble gases with an isotopic composition different from what is found anywhere else in the solar system. For this reason it is believed that these…