Related papers: Evidence for Possible Clouds in Pluto's Present Da…
Pluto's landscape is shaped by the cycles of the volatile ices covering its surface. In particular, the Sputnik Planitia (SP) ice sheet displays a large diversity of terrains, with bright and dark plains, pits, topographic depressions and…
Pluto's atmospheric haze settles out rapidly compared with geological timescales. It needs to be accounted for as a surface material, distinct from Pluto's icy bedrock and from the volatile ices that migrate via sublimation and condensation…
Triton possesses a thin atmosphere, primarily composed of nitrogen, sustained by the sublimation of surface ices. The goal is to determine the composition of Triton's atmosphere and to constrain the nature of surface-atmosphere…
Observations of the Pluto-Charon system, acquired with the ALMA interferometer on June 12-13, 2015, have yielded a detection of the CO(3-2) and HCN(4-3) rotational transitions from Pluto, providing a strong confirmation of the presence of…
The exploration of the Pluto-Charon system by the New Horizons spacecraft represents the first opportunity to understand the distribution of albedo and other photometric properties of the surfaces of objects in the Solar System's "Third…
Clouds and hazes are abundant in the thin and cold atmospheres of Triton and Pluto, where they are thought to be produced by interactions between atmospheric gases and ultraviolet photons from the Sun and those scattered by the local…
Pluto and its satellites will be the most distant objects ever reconnoitered when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducts its intensive flyby of this system in 2015. The size-frequency distribution (SFD) of craters on the surfaces in the…
Recent surveys have revealed that planets intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune ("super-Earths") are among the most common planets in the Galaxy. Atmospheric studies are the next step toward developing a comprehensive understanding…
The New Horizons spacecraft mapped colors and infrared spectra across the encounter hemispheres of Pluto and Charon. The volatile ices CH$_4$, CO, and N$_2$, that dominate Pluto's surface, have complicated spatial distributions resulting…
Pluto, Titan, and Triton make up a unique class of solar system bodies, with icy surfaces and chemically reducing atmospheres rich in organic photochemistry and haze formation. Hazes play important roles in these atmospheres, with physical…
Ocean worlds, or icy bodies in the outer solar system that have or once had subsurface liquid water oceans, are among the most compelling topics of astrobiology. Typically, confirming the existence of a subsurface ocean requires close…
We present an overview of the current status of neutrino oscillation studies at atmospheric neutrino experiments. While the current data gives some tentalising hints regarding the neutrino mass hierarchy, octant of $\theta_{23}$ and…
Our discovery of two new satellites of Pluto, designated S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2 (henceforth, P1 and P2), combined with the constraints on the absence of more distant satellites of Pluto, reveal that Pluto and its moons comprise an…
Measurements of trace-gases in planetary atmospheres help us explore chemical conditions different to those on Earth. Our nearest neighbor, Venus, has cloud decks that are temperate but hyper-acidic. We report the apparent presence of…
With high-resolution spectroscopy we can study exoplanet atmospheres and learn about their chemical composition, temperature profiles, and presence of clouds and winds, mainly in hot, giant planets. State-of-the-art instrumentation is…
Considering effects of tidal plus centrifugal stress acting on icy-rocks and the tensile strength thereof, icy-rocks being in the density range (1-2.4) g cm-3 which had come into existence as collisional ejecta (debris) in the vicinity of…
Data from the New Horizons mission to Pluto show no craters on Sputnik Planum down to the detection limit (2 km for low resolution data, 625 m for high resolution data). The number of small Kuiper Belt Objects that should be impacting Pluto…
Combining findings from New Horizons' suite of instruments reveals a bimodal haze particle distribution within Pluto's atmosphere, which haze models have not been able to reproduce. We employ the photochemical and microphysics KINAERO model…
The recent detection of an atmosphere surrounding the trans-Neptunian object (TNO) 2002 XV$_{93}$ from stellar occultation measurements has challenged the longstanding view that only the largest TNOs can sustain an atmosphere. Atmospheric…
We investigate the feasibility of detecting water molecules (H2O) and water ions (H20+) from the Europa plumes from a flyby mission. A Monte Carlo particle tracing method is used to simulate the trajectories of neutral particles under the…