Related papers: The Moon, a disk or a sphere?

This paper shows how the exposure of the Moon to the Earth's plasmasheet is subject to decadal variations due to lunar precession. The latter is a key property of the Moon's apparent orbit around the Earth - the nodes of that orbit precess…

Assuming the features commonly ascribed to dark matter, we discuss our glimpse of the possibility that dark matter as a light transmitting medium played a role that accounts for the discordant inferences about the dynamical behaviour of…

Ground-based observations of the Earthshine, i.e., the light scattered by Earth to the Moon, and then reflected back to Earth, simulate space observations of our planet and represent a powerful benchmark for the studies of Earth-like…

The concept of sphere of influence of a planet is useful in both the context of impact monitoring of asteroids with the Earth and of the design of interplanetary trajectories for spacecrafts. After reviewing the classical results, we…

The Moon often appears larger near the perceptual horizon and smaller high in the sky though the visual angle subtended is invariant. We show how this illusion results from the optimization of a projective geometrical frame for conscious…

The properties of universes are explored that are entirely in the interior of black holes in another universe, a `mother universe'. It is argued that these models offer a paradigm that may shed a new light on old cosmological problems. The…

This review summarises the invited presentation I gave on the Milky Way disc. The idea underneath was to touch those topics that can be considered hot nowadays in the Galactic disk research: the reality of the thick disk, the spiral…

We simulate the hypothesised collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized impactor that created the Moon. Amongst the resulting debris disk in some impacts, we find a self-gravitating clump of material. It is roughly the mass of the…

We examine several conducting spheres moving through a magnetic field gradient. An analytical approximation is derived and an experiment is conducted to verify the analytical solution. The experiment is simulated as well to produce a…

Current thinking about the Moon as a destination has revitalized interest in lunar astronomical observatories. Once seen by a large scientific community as a highly enabling site, the dramatic improvement in capabilities for free-space…

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…

The optical and infrared spectra of a wide variety of `cool' astronomical objects including the Sun, sunspots, K-, M- and S-type stars, carbon stars, brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets are reviewed. The review provides the necessary…

Ambitious studies of Earth-like extrasolar planets are outlined in the context of an exploration initiative for a return to the Earth's Moon. Two mechanism for linearly polarizing light reflected from Earth-like planets are discussed: 1)…

We revisit the concept of sphere of gravitational activity, to which we give both a geometrical and physical meaning. This study aims to refine this concept in a much broader context that could, for instance, be applied to exo-planetary…

This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of the abundances and distribution of S, and the processes that control the behavior of S on the Earth's Moon and on Mercury. The two planetary bodies share notable similarities, such as…

This article is a tutorial on deriving physical properties from the spectral energy distributions of circumstellar disks. It includes a new derivation of disk mass from millimeter-wave flux density using recent disk model parameters. The…

We study here images of thin accretion disks around black holes and two classes of naked singularity spacetimes and compare these scenarios. The naked singularity models which have photon spheres have single accretion disk with its inner…

Bodies that lack a significant atmosphere and internal magnetic fields, such as the Moon and asteroids, can to a first approximation be considered passive absorbers of the solar wind. The solar wind ions and electrons directly impact the…

Screening mechanisms for a three-form field around a dense source such as the Sun are investigated. Working with the dual vector, we can obtain a thin-shell where field interactions are short range. The field outside the source adopts the…

It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…