Related papers: In icy ocean worlds, size matters!
On tidally locked lava planets, magma ocean can form on the permanent dayside. The circulation of the magma ocean can be driven by stellar radiation and atmospheric winds. The strength of ocean circulation and the depth of the magma ocean…
Tidal dissipation in planetary interiors is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive the evolution of star-planet and planet-moon systems. Tidal dissipation in planets is intrinsically related to their internal structure. In…
The ice shell on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, exhibits strong asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, with all known geysers concentrated over the south pole, even though the expected pattern of tidal-rotational…
Under tidal forcing, icy satellites with subsurface oceans deform as if the surface were a membrane stretched around a fluid layer. `Membrane worlds' is thus a fitting name for these bodies and membrane theory provides the perfect toolbox…
We constructed a 6-degrees of freedom rotational model of Titan as a 3-layer body consisting of a rigid core, a fluid global ocean, and a floating ice shell. The ice shell exhibits partially-compensated lateral thickness variations in order…
Condensed planets contract or expand as their temperature changes. With the exception of the effect of phase changes, this phenomenon is generally interpreted as being solely related to the thermal expansivity of the planet's components.…
Aggregation of ice particles is a fundamental process in the interstellar medium as well as in planet formation. Dedicated to study the contact physics of nm-ice particles we developed a thermal gradient force microscope. This allows us and…
Saturn raises a time-dependent tide on its small moon Enceladus, due to the eccentricity of the orbit. As shown in a companion paper (Goldreich et al.), the resulting tidal heating drives Enceladus into a limit cycle, in which its…
Tidally locked lava planets are hot, rocky worlds on close-in orbits with a permanent molten dayside. With JWST, their surfaces and atmospheres are beginning to be revealed. This work investigates 3D magma-ocean dynamics, derives scaling…
The Ice Giants Uranus and Neptune have hydrogen-based atmospheres with several constituents that condense in their cold upper atmospheres. A small number of bright cloud systems observed in both planets are good candidates for moist…
The North Atlantic Ocean circulation, fuelled by winds and surface buoyancy fluxes, carries 1.25 PettaWatts of heat poleward in the subtropics, and helps in regulating global weather and climate patterns. Here, we assess the relative…
The presence of salt in ocean water strongly affects the melt rate and the shape evolution of ice, both of utmost relevance in geophysical and ocean flow and thus for the climate. To get a better quantitative understanding of the physical…
Our understanding of the surface porosity of icy moons and its evolution with depth remains limited, including the precise scale at which ice compaction occurs under self-weight pressure. This parameter is of crucial interest for the…
The present study investigates how global thermodynamic properties of the climate system are affected by the changes in the intensity of the imposed oceanic heat transport in an atmospheric general circulation model in aqua-planet…
Planets with masses between 0.1 - 10 M_earth are believed to host dense atmospheres. These atmospheres can play an important role on the planet's spin evolution, since thermal atmospheric tides, driven by the host star, may counterbalance…
In many geophysical and planetary environments, such as Earth's ocean and atmosphere as well as subsurface oceans of icy satellites, convection driven by bottom geothermal heating usually coexists with baroclinic eddies driven by lateral…
Probabilistic relationships between the mass and radius of planets are useful for a variety of purposes, including estimating the yields of planet discovery efforts and the radii of discovered planets given their masses. Previous work on…
Tidal dissipation in planetary interiors is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive the evolution of star-planet and planet-moon systems. New constraints are now obtained both in the Solar and exoplanetary systems. Tidal dissipation…
We consider the impact of thermal conduction in clusters of galaxies on the (unmagnetized) interface between a cold gaseous cloud and a hotter gas flowing over the cloud (the so-called cold front). We argue that near the stagnation point of…
Ocean surface waves can propagate long distances through regions containing floating ice covers. The impacts ocean waves have on the ice covers are of interest in the climate change era, as the polar regions experience pressure from rising…