Related papers: Mercury's Internal Structure
Solid body tides provide key information on the interior structure, evolution, and origin of the planetary bodies. Our Solar system harbours a very diverse population of planetary bodies, including those composed of rock, ice, gas, or a…
The Cassini mission in the Saturnian system is an outstanding opportunity to improve our knowledge of the satellites of Saturn. The data obtained thanks to this mission must be confronted to theoretical models. This paper aims at modeling…
Mercury, due to its close location to the Sun, is surrounded by an environment whose conditions may be considered as "extreme" in the entire Solar System. Both solar wind and radiation are stronger with respect to other Solar System bodies,…
We discuss the internal structure of stars in the mass range 1.5 to 4 M_sun from the PMS to the subgiant phase with a particular emphasis on the convective core and the convective superficial layers. Different physical aspects are…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
The upcoming space missions, MESSENGER and BepiColombo with onboard instrumentation capable of measuring the rotational parameters stimulate the objective to reach an accurate theory of the rotational motion of Mercury. For obtaining the…
The Juno mission has provided measurements of Jupiter s gravity field with an outstanding level of accuracy, leading to better constraints on the interior of the planet. Improving our knowledge of the internal structure of Jupiter is key to…
Mercury's core mass fraction (CMF) is ~0.7, more than double that of the other rocky planets in the solar system, which have CMFs of ~0.3. The origin of Mercury's large, iron-rich core remains unknown. Adding to this mystery, an elusive…
Mercury, the innermost planet, formed under highly reduced conditions, based mainly on surface Fe, S, and Si abundances determined from MESSENGER mission data. The minor element Cr may serve as an independent oxybarometer, but only very…
The classical scenario of terrestrial planet formation is characterized by a phase of giant impacts among Moon-to-Mars mass planetary embryos. While the classic model and its adaptations have produced adequate analogs of the outer three…
Externally driven interstellar turbulence plays an important role in shaping the density structure in molecular clouds. Here we study the dynamical role of internally driven turbulence in a self-gravitating molecular cloud core. Depending…
The planet Mercury is locked in a spin-orbit resonance where it rotates three times about its spin axis for every two orbits about the Sun. The current explanation for this unique state assumes that the initial rotation of this planet was…
A circumsolar dust ring has been recently discovered close to the orbit of Mercury. There are currently no hypotheses for the origin of this ring in the literature, so we explore four different origin scenarios here: the dust originated…
The composition of Jupiter and the primordial distribution of the heavy elements are determined by its formation history. As a result, in order to constrain the primordial internal structure of Jupiter the growth of the core and the…
The planet Mercury possesses a small but highly dynamic magnetosphere in which the role and dynamics of electrons are still largely unknown. We aim at modeling the global dynamics of solar wind electrons impinging on Mercury's…
We present an inversion method based on Bayesian analysis to constrain the interior structure of terrestrial exoplanets, in the form of chemical composition of the mantle and core size. Specifically, we identify what parts of the interior…
The state of a particle in space and time is characterized by its mass and spin, which therefore determine the inertial properties of the particle. The coupling of intrinsic spin with rotation is examined and the corresponding inertial…
While it is accepted that the eccentricity of Mercury (0.206) favours entrapment into the 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, open is the question how and when the capture took place. A recent work by Makarov (2012) has demonstrated that trapping…
To characterize the meteoroid environment around Mercury and its contribution to the planet's exosphere, we combined four distinctive sources of meteoroids in the solar system: main-belt asteroids, Jupiter family comets, Halley-type comets,…
The absence of planets interior to Mercury continues to puzzle terrestrial planet formation models, particularly when contrasted with the relatively high derived occurrence rates of short-period planets around Sun-like stars. Recent work…