Related papers: Packing Moons Inside the Earth
Large terrestrial planets are expected to have muted topography and deep oceans, implying that most super-Earths should be entirely covered in water, so-called waterworlds. This is important because waterworlds lack a silicate weathering…
Most mechanisms proposed for the formation of planets are modified versions of the mechanism proposed for the solar system. Here we argue that, in terms of those planetary systems which have been observed, the case for the solar system…
The Giant Impact is currently accepted as the leading theory for the formation of Earth's Moon. Successful scenarios for lunar origin should be able to explain the chemical composition of the Moon (volatile content and stable isotope…
Most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system can be explained by a collision between a planetary embryo and the growing Earth late in the accretion process. Simulations show that most of the material that eventually aggregates to form…
If a collection of identical particles is poured into a container, different shapes will fill to different densities. But what is the shape that fills a container as close as possible to a pre-specified, desired density? We demonstrate a…
We demonstrate that habitable Earth-mass planets and moons can exist in the Kepler-16 system, known to host a Saturn-mass planet around a stellar binary, by investigating their orbital stability in the standard and extended habitable zone…
Random packing of unoriented regular polygons and star polygons on a two-dimensional flat, continuous surface is studied numerically using random sequential adsorption algorithm. Obtained results are analyzed to determine saturated random…
We examined which exo-systems contain moons that may be detected in transit. We numerically modeled transit light curves of Earth-like and giant planets that cointain moons with 0.005--0.4 Earth-mass. The orbital parameters were randomly…
The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…
By applying Monte-Carlo method, the Moon radius is obtained by counting craters in a spherical square over the surface of it. As it is well known, approximate values for $\pi $ can be obtained by counting random numbers in a square and in a…
The abstract is additional with repect to the paper published in JGCD. Ordinary Earth satellites are usually placed into five categories of special orbits: sun-synchronous orbits, orbits at the critical inclination, frozen orbits, repeating…
While the solar system contains as many as about 20 times more moons than planets, no moon has been definitively detected around any of the thousands of extrasolar planets so far. The question naturally arises why an exomoon detection has…
A free-floating planet is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Center. The presence of exomoons orbiting free-floating planets has been theoretically predicted…
Irregular moons are a class of satellite found orbiting all of the Solar System's giant planets: as their orbits don't match those of their planets, they are theorised to have formed elsewhere in the Solar System and were subsequently…
The detection of thousands of extrasolar planets by the transit method naturally raises the question of whether potential extrasolar observers could detect the transits of the Solar System planets. We present a comprehensive analysis of the…
The sphere packing problem is an old puzzle. We consider packings with m spheres in the unit cell (m-periodic packings). For the case m = 1 (lattice packings), Voronoi proved there are finitely many inequivalent local optima and presented…
We present a short review of the existing evidence in favor of neutrino mass and neutrino oscillations which come from different kinds of experiments. We focus our attention in particular on solar neutrinos, presenting a global updated…
We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…
The 27 satellites of Uranus are enigmatic, with dark surfaces coated by material that could be rich in organics. Voyager 2 imaged the southern hemispheres of Uranus' five largest 'classical' moons Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and…
A time-dependent gravitational constant or mass would correctly describe the suspected increasing of both: the Astronomical unit and the eccentricity of the Lunar orbit around the Earth.