Related papers: Recent Tectonic Activity on Pluto Driven by Phase …
Voyager 1 and 2 crossed the heliopause at $\sim$122 AU in 2012 and $\sim$119 AU in 2018, respectively. It was quite a surprise because the thickness of the inner heliosheath obtained by the existing at that time models of the global…
Surface modification on Jupiter's volcanically active moon, Io, has to date been attributed almost exclusively to lava emplacement and volcanic plume deposits. Here we demonstrate that wind-blown transport of sediment may also be altering…
Models of thermal evolution, crustal production, and CO$_2$ cycling are used to constrain the prospects for habitability of rocky planets, with Earth-like size and composition, in the stagnant lid regime. Specifically, we determine the…
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…
Pluto's surface displays a wide variety of geologic units from smooth plains to extremely rugged mountainous expanses. These terrains range in age from young, actively resurfaced regions (no observable craters even in the highest-resolution…
We examine the radius evolution of close-in giant planets with a planet evolution model that couples the orbital-tidal and thermal evolution. For 45 transiting systems, we compute a large grid of cooling/contraction paths forward in time,…
Planets with several Earth masses and a few day orbital periods have been discovered through radial velocity and transit surveys. Regardless of their formation mechanism, a key evolution issue is the efficiency of their retention near their…
Water ice is expected to be the dominant volatile component of bodies formed in the outer Solar System. However, recent observations of comets and trans-Neptunian objects suggest that the relative abundances of ices can vary substantially,…
Geophysical measurements can reveal the structure of icy ocean worlds and cycling of volatiles. The associated density, temperature, sound speed, and electrical conductivity of such worlds thus characterizes their habitability. To explore…
The progress article - Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate - by Seidel et al. (2008) published in the first issue of Nature Geosciences, summarizes the results of several methods to determine the width of the tropical zone.…
The analyses of Titan's gravity field obtained by Cassini space mission suggest the presence of an internal ocean beneath its icy surface. The characterization of the geophysical parameters of the icy shell and the ocean is important to…
Extrasolar planets on eccentric short-period orbits provide a laboratory in which to study radiative and tidal interactions between a planet and its host star under extreme forcing conditions. Studying such systems probes how the planet's…
After describing all the contradictions associated with the current Plate Tectonics theory, this paper proposes a model where a single cause can explain all geophysical and geological phenomena. The source of the Earth's activity lies in…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) can result from dynamical scattering processes happening in the first few million years of a planetary system's life. Several models predict the possibility, for these isolated planetary-mass objects, to retain…
The fundamental properties of ice have always attracted a lot of interest due to omnipresence of ice in many different natural contexts. Since cubic ice recently become experimentally accessible from a low-density gas hydrate precursor [1,…
Impacts by rocky and icy bodies are thought to have played a key role in shaping the composition of solar system objects, including the Earth's habitability. Hence, it is likely that they play a similar role in exoplanetary systems. We…
Globally ice-covered oceans have been found on multiple moons in the solar system and may also have been a feature of Earth's past. However, relatively little is understood about the dynamics of these ice-covered oceans, which affect not…
The habitability of terrestrial exoplanets orbiting M dwarfs is a key topic in the search for extraterrestrial life. The climates of these planets differ significantly from the Earth's due to their likely tidal locking, resulting in a…
Jupiter's icy moons are believed to host subsurface liquid oceans, and among them, Europa stands out as one of the most promising candidates for extraterrestrial life. Yet, the processes driving oceanic flows beneath its ice shell, as well…
Could tidal dissipation within Enceladus' subsurface ocean account for the observed heat flow? Earthlike models of dynamical tides give no definitive answer because they neglect the influence of the crust. I propose here the first model of…