Related papers: Packing Moons Inside the Earth
Understanding the Moon's formation mechanism is necessary for studying not only the Moon itself, but also the evolution, formation, habitability, and structure of other planets and the moons in the Solar system and in extrasolar planetary…
We investigate the habitability of hypothethical moons orbiting known exoplanets. This study focuses on big, rocky exomoons that are capable of maintaining a significant atmosphere. To determine their habitability, we calculate the incident…
In this paper we consider the problem of packing a fixed number of identical circles inside the unit circle container, where the packing is complicated by the presence of fixed size circular prohibited areas. Here the objective is to…
For dealing with the equal sphere packing problem, we propose a serial symmetrical relocation algorithm, which is effective in terms of the quality of the numerical results. We have densely packed up to 200 equal spheres in spherical…
The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed by an impact between the Earth and an impactor around 4.5 billion years ago. This impact could have been so energetic that it could have mixed and homogenized the Earth's mantle. However, this view…
What is the longest rope on the unit sphere? Intuition tells us that the answer to this packing problem depends on the rope's thickness. For a countably infinite number of prescribed thickness values we construct and classify all solution…
The lunar geological record is expected to contain a rich record of the galactic environment of the Solar System, including records of nearby (i.e. less than a few tens of parsecs) supernova explosions. This record will be composed of two…
Material from the surface of a planet can be ejected into space by a large impact, and could carry primitive life forms with it. We performed n-body simulations of such ejecta to determine where in the Solar System rock from Earth and Mars…
The problem of packing ellipsoids of different sizes and shapes into an ellipsoidal container so as to minimize a measure of overlap between ellipsoids is considered. A bilevel optimization formulation is given, together with an algorithm…
A successful solar system model must reproduce the four terrestrial planets. Here, we focus on 1) the likelihood of forming Mercury and the four terrestrial planets in the same system (a 4-P system); 2) the orbital properties and masses of…
The memo is exploring possibilities to set up extraterrestrial experimental facilities to study particles physics. The Moon is considered as the most promising location for artificial particle sources outside the Earth. This natural…
The presence of rings and moons around exoplanets is likely to be one of the next great discoveries in exoplanet research. Using theories developed for the Solar System, we explore the possibility of coupled ring-moon cycles around…
We study the packing of a large number of congruent and non--overlapping circles inside a regular polygon. We have devised efficient algorithms that allow one to generate configurations of $N$ densely packed circles inside a regular polygon…
We ask if Earth-like planets (terrestrial mass and habitable-zone orbit) can be detected in multi-planet systems, using astrometric and radial velocity observations. We report here the preliminary results of double-blind calculations…
The field of exoplanetary science has experienced a recent surge of new systems that is largely due to the precision photometry provided by the Kepler mission. The latest discoveries have included compact planetary systems in which the…
Detections of massive extrasolar moons are shown feasible with the Kepler space telescope. Kepler's findings of about 50 exoplanets in the stellar habitable zone naturally make us wonder about the habitability of their hypothetical moons.…
Current lunar origin scenarios suggest that Earth's Moon may have resulted from the merger of two (or more) smaller moonlets. Dynamical studies of multiple moons find that these satellite systems are not stable, resulting in moonlet…
In this paper, we present a physical modeling activity whose objective is to allow students to determine the differences between a disk and a sphere using pure scientific criteria. Thereunto, we reproduce the Sun-Earth-Moon system with…
We study the problem of high-dimensional multiple packing in Euclidean space. Multiple packing is a natural generalization of sphere packing and is defined as follows. Let $ N>0 $ and $ L\in\mathbb{Z}_{\ge2} $. A multiple packing is a set…
Today, we know ~4330 exoplanets orbiting their host stars in ~3200 planetary systems. The diversity of these exoplanets is large, and none of the known exoplanets is a twin to any of the solar system planets, nor is any of the known…