Related papers: The Moon, a disk or a sphere?
The Moon is believed to have formed in the aftermath of a giant impact between a planetary mass body and the proto-Earth. In a typical giant impact scenario, a disk of vapor, liquid, and solid debris forms around the proto-Earth and--after…
The Solar System motivates students to interest themselves in sciences, as a large number of concepts may be easily introduced through the observation and understanding of planet's motion. Using a large representation of the Solar System at…
To date, nearly two hundred planet-forming disks have been imaged with high resolution. Our propensity to study bright and extended objects is however biasing our view of the disk demography. In this work, we contribute to alleviate this…
Using ideas of sphere packing problem we estimate the number of solid moons that can be packed inside the Earth, assuming that both the Moon and the Earth are perfect sphere.
Magnetohydrodynamic star-in-a-box simulations of convection and dynamos in a solar-like star with different rotation rates are presented. These simulations produce solar-like differential rotation with a fast equator and slow poles, and…
We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument we designed…
The frequency and the characteristics of lunar impacting meteorites are reconsidered under the general assumption of belonging to the sporadic meteoroids. We develop the model for evaluating the luminous energy detected in the visual band…
Jupyter notebooks are increasingly being adopted by teachers to deliver interactive practical sessions to their students. Notebooks come with many attractive features, such as the ability to combine textual explanations, multimedia content,…
The proposed multi-impact model explains the formation of the Moon, Charon, and binary asteroids without invoking catastrophic cosmic events. The main elements of the new model are as follows: a. A primordial, low-mass proto-satellite disk…
The first three quarters of this paper consists of a pedagogical review of neutrino oscillations, including vacuum oscillations, constant density matter oscillations and variable density matter oscillations. We then address the question of…
Context. The solar chromosphere is the interface between the solar surface and the solar corona. Modelling of this region is difficult because it represents the transition from optically thick to thin radiation escape, from gas-pressure…
A surprisingly large amount of information on our solar system can be gained from simple measurements of the apparent angular diameters of the sun and the moon. This information includes the average density of the sun, the distance between…
In this paper we propose a simplified model to describe the dissipative effects of tides. We assume a spherical Earth with a dissipative coupling with a mechanical dumbbell. The latter has a mass much smaller than the Earth's, and it models…
We investigate the influence of lunar-like satellites on the infrared orbital light curves of Earth-analog extra-solar planets. Such light curves will be obtained by NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and ESA's Darwin missions as a…
The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…
Solar energetic ions are a known hazard to both spacecraft electronics and to manned space flights in interplanetary space missions that extend over a long period of time. A dipole-like magnetic field and a plasma source, forming a mini…
In this article we consider different methods of modeling asteroid shapes, especially lightcurve inversion technique, and scattering laws used for it. We also introduce our program, which constructs lightcurves for a given asteroid shape…
Surface chemistry of airless bodies in the solar system can be derived from remote x-ray spectral measurements from an orbiting spacecraft. X- rays from planetary surfaces are excited primarily by solar x-rays. Several experiments in the…
We present another explanation for the moon illusion, the phenomenon in which the moon looks larger near the horizon than near the zenith. In our model of the moon illusion, the sky is considered a spatially-contiguous and…
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…