Related papers: In icy ocean worlds, size matters!
Unopposed radiative cooling in clusters of galaxies results in excessive mass deposition rates. However, the cool cores of galaxy clusters are continuously heated by thermal conduction and turbulent heat diffusion due to minor mergers or…
The Southern Ocean plays an integral role in the global climate system, exchanging heat, salt, and carbon throughout the major ocean basins via the deep, fast-flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is…
Turbulent heat and freshwater transport at ice-ocean interfaces controls glacier and iceberg melt rates, yet the underlying physics remains poorly constrained. Parameterizations that assume shear boundary layer scaling are commonly used,…
We propose a general principle that under the radiative-convective equilibrium, the spatial and temporal variations in a planet's surface and atmosphere tend to increase its cooling. This principle is based on Jensen's inequality and the…
Planetary obliquity (axial tilt) plays an important role in regulating the climate evolution and habitability of water-covered planets. Despite the suspicion of large obliquities in several exoplanetary systems, this phenomenon remains hard…
Ice sintering is a form of metamorphism that drives the microstructural evolution of an aggregate of grains through surface and volume diffusion. This leads to an increase in the grain-to-grain contact area ("neck") and density of the…
The influence of atmospheric composition on the climates of present-day and early Earth has been studied extensively, but the role of ocean composition has received less attention. We use the ROCKE-3D ocean-atmosphere general circulation…
We generalize the theory of the inhomogeneity effect to enable comparison among different inhomogeneous planets. A metric of inhomogeneity based on the cumulative distribution function is applied to investigate the dependence of planetary…
The interior flux of a giant planet impacts atmospheric motion, and the atmosphere dictates the interior's cooling. Here we use a non-hydrostatic general circulation model (Simulating Nonhydrostatic Atmospheres on Planets, SNAP) coupled…
About 4000 exoplanets have been confirmed since the year of 1992, and for most of the planets, the main parameters that can be measured are planetary radius and mass. Based on these two parameters, surface gravity can be estimated. In this…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
The weather layers of the gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, comprise the shallow atmospheric layers that are influenced energetically by a combination of incoming solar radiation and localised latent heating of condensates, as well as…
Magnetic fields of laboratory, planetary, stellar, and galactic plasmas commonly exhibit significant order on large temporal or spatial scales compared to the otherwise random motions within the hosting system. Such ordered fields can be…
The marginal ice zone is a highly dynamical region where sea ice and ocean waves interact. Large-scale sea ice models only compute domain-averaged responses. As the majority of the marginal ice zone consists of mobile ice floes surrounded…
Rock and ice are ubiquitous geologic materials. While apparently solid, they also exhibit fluid behavior under stress - a property termed viscoelasticity. Viscoelastic convection of Earth's mantle drives tectonic plate motion with…
Cloud is critical for planetary climate and habitability, but it is also one of the most challenging parts of studying planets in and beyond the solar system. Here we use a cloud-resolving model (CRM) with high resolution (2 km) in a…
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…
The mechanism that causes an interdecadal oscillation in a coarse resolution sector ocean model forced by mixed boundary conditions is studied. The oscillation is characterized by large fluctuations in convective activity and air/sea heat…
A multiphysics simulation model incorporating a sintering model coupled with the MultIHeaTS thermal solver was developed to study the evolution of icy moons' microstructure. The sintering process is highly dependent on temperature, and this…
Tide-locked lava worlds are surface-melted rocky planets under 1:1 tidally locked orbit (i.e., synchronously rotating) with orbital period being equal to rotation period and with permanent hot dayside and cold nightside. Previous studies on…