Related papers: Thermal Evolution of Uranus with a Frozen Interior
The best constraints on the internal structures of giant planets have historically come from measurements of their gravity fields. These gravity data are inherently mostly sensitive to a planet's outer regions, providing only loose…
Photo-evaporative mass loss sculpts the atmospheric evolution of tightly-orbiting sub-Neptune-mass exoplanets. To date, models of the mass loss from warm Neptunes have assumed that the atmospheric abundances remain constant throughout the…
The evolution of stars and planets is mostly controlled by the properties of their atmosphere. This is particularly true in the case of exoplanets close to their stars, for which one has to account both for an (often intense) irradiation…
The interior composition and structure of Uranus are ambiguous. It is unclear whether Uranus is composed of fully differentiated layers dominated by an icy mantle or has smooth compositional gradients. The Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP),…
The impact of strong magnetic fields B>10e13 G on the thermal evolution of neutron stars is investigated, including crustal heating by magnetic field decay. For this purpose, we perform 2D cooling simulations with anisotropic thermal…
For most planets in the range of radii from 1 to 4 R$_{\oplus}$, water is a major component of the interior composition. At high pressure H${}_{2}$O can be solid, but for larger planets, like Neptune, the temperature can be too high for…
Reproducing Uranus and Neptune remains a challenge for simulations of solar system formation. The ice giants' peculiar obliquities suggest that they both suffered giant collisions during their formation. Thus, there must have been an epoch…
As a neutron star spins down, the nuclear matter continuously is converted into quark matter due to the core density increase and then latent heat is released. We have investigated the thermal evolution of neutron stars undergoing such…
The formation and orbital evolution of Saturn's inner mid-sized moons are still debated. The most puzzling aspects are 1) how the Tethys-Dione pair and the Mimas-Enceladus pair passed through their strong 3:2 mean-motion resonances during…
Uranus and Neptune are the archetypes of "ice giants", a class of planets that may be among the most common in the Galaxy. They hold the keys to understand the atmospheric dynamics and structure of planets with hydrogen atmospheres inside…
The narrow main rings of Uranus are composed of almost exclusively centimeter- to meter-sized particles, with a very small or nonexistent dust component; however, the filling factor, composition, thickness, mass, and detailed particle size…
We investigate the formation and dissipation of large scale neutrino structures in cosmologies where the time evolution of dynamical dark energy is stopped by a growing neutrino mass. In models where the coupling between neutrinos and dark…
The planets Uranus and Neptune with small apparent diameters are primary calibration standards. We investigate their variability at ~90 GHz using archived data taken at the IRAM 30m telescope during the 20 years period 1985 to 2005. We…
Future instruments like NIRCam and MIRI on JWST or METIS at the ELT will be able to image exoplanets that are too faint for current direct imaging instruments. Evolutionary models predicting the planetary intrinsic luminosity as a function…
Recent observations show that our universe is accelerating by dark energy, so it is important to investigate the thermodynamical properties of it. The Undulant Universe is a model with equation of state $\omega(a)=-\cos(b\ln a)$ for dark…
A collection of modern, field-theoretical equations of state is applied to the investigation of cooling properties of compact stars. These comprise neutron stars as well as hypothetical strange matter stars, made up of absolutely stable…
We investigate the enrichment patterns of several delivery scenarios of the volatiles to the atmospheres of ice giants, having in mind that the only well constrained determination made remotely, i.e. the carbon abundance measurement,…
Uranus and Neptune exhibit fast surface zonal winds that can reach up to few hundred meters per second. Previous studies on zonal gravitational harmonics and Ohmic dissipation constraints suggest that the wind speeds diminish rapidly in…
We review the current understanding of the upper atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune, and explore the upcoming opportunities available to study these exciting planets. The ice giants are the least understood planets in the solar system,…
Detailed observations of the temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation indicate that we live in an open universe. From the size of these fluctuations it is concluded that the geometry of the universe is quite close to…