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Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in the outer Solar System are predominantly small, icy worlds long presumed to be atmosphereless except for the largest bodies. Until now, Pluto has been unique among TNOs in exhibiting a substantial…

Context: Pluto possesses a thin atmosphere, primarily composed of nitrogen, in which the detection of methane has been reported. Aims: The goal is to constrain essential but so far unknown parameters of Pluto's atmosphere such as the…

Despite many similarities, there are significant observed differences between Uranus and Neptune: while Uranus is tilted and has a regular set of satellites, suggesting their accretion from a disk, Neptune's moons are irregular and are…

On 6 Jun 2020, Pluto's stellar occultation was successfully observed at a ground-based observatory and Pluto's atmospheric parameters were investigated. We used an atmospheric model of Pluto (DO15), assuming a spherical and transparent pure…

This brief review will discuss the current knowledge on the origin and evolution of the nitrogen atmospheres of the icy bodies in the solar system, particularly of Titan, Triton and Pluto. An important tool to analyse and understand the…

Neptune's present axial tilt of approximately 28 deg. with respect to its orbital plane can be explained by collisions that its primordial core may have experienced with surrounding planetary embryos during the final stages of its…

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…

Giant collisions can account for Uranus's and Neptune's large obliquities, yet generating two planets with widely different tilts and strikingly similar spin rates is a low-probability event. Trapping into a secular spin-orbit resonance, a…

Plutinos are Kuiper-belt objects that share the 3:2 Neptune resonance with Pluto. The long-term stability of Plutino orbits depends on their eccentricity. Plutinos with eccentricities close to Pluto (fractional eccentricity difference…

The Kuiper belt is a population of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. The complex orbital structure of the Kuiper belt, including several categories of objects inside and outside of resonances with Neptune, emerged as a result of…

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…

We present results from a multi-chord Pluto stellar occultation observed on 29 June 2015 from New Zealand and Australia. This occurred only two weeks before the NASA New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system and serves as a useful comparison…

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has revealed the complex geology of Pluto and Charon. Pluto's encounter hemisphere shows ongoing surface geological activity centered on a vast basin containing a thick layer of volatile ices that appears to…

We estimate the loss of nitrogen from Pluto over its lifetime, including the giant planet instability period, which we term the "Wild Years." We analyze the orbital migration of 53 simulated Plutinos, which are Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs)…

Titan's ice shell floats on top of a global ocean revealed by the large tidal Love number $k_2 = 0.616\pm0.067$ registered by Cassini. The Cassini observation exceeds the predicted $k_2$ by one order of magnitude in the absence of an ocean,…

A large fraction of known rocky exoplanets are expected to have been spun-down to a state of synchronous rotation, including temperate ones. Studies about the atmospheric and surface processes occurring on such planets thus assume that the…

Is there oceanic superrotation on exoplanets? Atmospheric superrotation, characterized by west-to-east winds over the equator, is a common phenomenon in the atmospheres of Venus, Titan, Saturn, Jupiter, and tidally locked exoplanets. The…

Pluto has been observed by the New Horizons space probe to have some relatively fresh ice on the old ices covering most of the surface. Pluto was thought to consist of only a rocky core below the ice. Here I show that Pluto can have an iron…

The Alice instrument on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft observed an ultraviolet solar occultation by Pluto's atmosphere on 2015 July 14. The transmission vs. altitude was sensitive to the presence of N2, CH4, C2H2, C2H4, C2H6, and haze. We…

Titan is one of the more distinctive bodies in our solar system. In addition to being the largest of Saturn's moons, its thick atmosphere gene-rates interest because of its similarities and differences with Earth [1, 2]. Like Earth, Titan's…