Related papers: How dirt cones form on glaciers: field observation…

Penitentes and suncups are structures formed as snow melts, typically high in the mountains. When the snow is dirty, dirt cones and other structures can form instead. Building on previous field observations and experiments, this work…

A glacier table consists of a rock supported by a slender column of ice and form naturally on glaciers. We investigate the onset of their formation at a smaller scale in a controlled environment. Depending on the size and thermal…

Grains of ice are formed spontaneously when water vapor is injected into a weakly-ionized laboratory plasma in which the background gas has been cooled to cryogenic temperatures comparable to those of deep space. These ice grains are…

Planets have been detected around a variety of stars, including low-mass objects, such as brown dwarfs. However, such extreme cases are challenging for planet formation models. Recent sub-millimeter observations of disks around brown dwarf…

Spatiotemporal patterns in nature, such as ripples or dunes, formed by a fluid streaming over a sandy surface show complex behavior despite their simple forms. Below the surface, the granular structure of the sand particles is subject to…

Spike-shaped structures are produced by light-driven ablation in very different contexts. Penitentes 1-4 m high are common on Andean glaciers, where their formation changes glacier dynamics and hydrology. Laser ablation can produce cones…

Context. The study of the snow line is an important topic in several domains of astrophysics, and particularly for the evolution of proto-stellar environments and the formation of planets. Aims. The formation of the first layer of ice on…

We show that condensation is an efficient particle growth mechanism, leading to growth beyond decimeter-sized pebbles close to an ice line in protoplanetary discs. As coagulation of dust particles is frustrated by bouncing and…

It has been implicitly assumed that ices on grains in molecular clouds and proto planetary disks are formed by homogeneous layers regardless of their composition or crystallinity. To verify this assumption, we observed the H2O deposition…

The size distribution of asteroids in the solar system suggests that they formed top-down, with 100-1000 km bodies forming from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps of small solid particles. We investigate the conditions under which…

Understanding the history and evolution of small bodies, such as dust grains and comets, in planet-forming disks is very important to reveal the architectural laws responsible for the creation of planetary systems. These small bodies in…

Small droplets on slender conical fibers spontaneously move along the fiber due to capillary action. The droplet motion depends on the geometry of the cone, the surface wettability, the surface tension, the viscosity, and the droplet size.…

We study the formation of rocky planets by dry pebble accretion from self-consistent dust-growth models. In particular, we aim at computing the maximum core mass of a rocky planet that can sustain a thin H-He atmosphere to account for the…

Rings and gaps are ubiquitous in protoplanetary disks. Larger dust grains will concentrate in gaseous rings more compactly due to stronger aerodynamic drag. However, the effects of dust concentration on the ring's thermal structure have not…

The process of forming a circumbinary planet is thought to be intimately related to the structure of the nascent circumbinary disc. It has been shown that the structure of a circumbinary disc depends strongly on 3-dimensional effects and on…

The freezing of a water rivulet begins with a water thread flowing over a very cold surface, is naturally followed by the growth of an ice layer and ends up with a water rivulet flowing on a static thin ice wall. The structure of this final…

While giant planet occurrence rates increase with stellar mass, occurrence rates of close-in super-Earths decrease. This is in contradiction to the expectation that the total mass of the planets in a system scale with the protoplanetary…

Cold molecular clouds are the birthplaces of stars and planets, where dense cores of gas collapse to form protostars. The dust mixed in these clouds is thought to be made of grains of an average size of 0.1 micrometer. We report the…

Ice naturally forms in the disordered or ``amorphous'' state when accreted from vapor at temperatures and pressures found in the interstellar medium and in the frigid, low density outer regions of the Sun's protoplanetary disk. It is…

The standard approach to obtaining knowledge about the properties of the surface layer of a comet from observations of gas production consists of two stages. First, various thermophysical models are used to calculate gas production for a…