Related papers: Decoding planetary surfaces by counting cracks
A fascinating class of patterns, often encountered in nature as meandering cracks on rocks, dried-out fields and tectonic plates is produced by the fracture of solids. Here we report the observation and modeling of an unusual type of…
The multi-scale expansions and contractions of the Earth's magnetosphere explain fundamental issues of magnetic storm-substorm relationship. This magnetospheric behavior is in agreement with a model of 3D-spirally-faster-inward-oscillating…
It is now understood that the accretion of terrestrial planets naturally involves giant collisions, the moon-forming impact being a well known example. In the aftermath of such collisions the surface of the surviving planet is very hot and…
Rocky planets in our Solar System, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Moon, which is generally added to this group due to its geological complexity, possess a solid surface and share a common structure divided into major layers,…
Earth's tectonic processes regulate the formation of continental crust, control its unique deep water and carbon cycles, and are vital to its surface habitability. A major driver of steady-state plate tectonics on Earth is the sinking of…
In this paper we present two examples of recent investigations that we have undertaken, applying Machine Learning (ML) neural networks (NN) to image datasets from outer planet missions to achieve feature recognition. Our first investigation…
The pattern development of multiple cracks in extremely anisotropic solids such as bilayer or multilayer two-dimensional (2D) crystals contains rich physics, which, however, remains largely unexplored. We studied crack interaction across…
Mountain ranges, volcanoes, trenches, and craters are common on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System, and we might we expect the same for rocky exoplanets. With ever larger telescopes under design and a growing need to not just detect…
Fracture paths in quasi-two-dimenisonal (2D) media (e.g thin layers of materials, paper) are analyzed as self-affine graphs $h(x)$ of height $h$ as a function of length $x$. We show that these are multiscaling, in the sense that $n^{th}$…
Fluid-induced slip of fractures is characterized by strong multiphysics couplings. Three physical processes are considered: Flow, rock deformation and fracture deformation. The fractures are represented as lower-dimensional objects embedded…
One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of…
Surface liquid water is essential for standard planetary habitability. Calculations of atmospheric circulation on tidally locked planets around M stars suggest that this peculiar orbital configuration lends itself to the trapping of large…
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…
Observations of debris disks allow for the study of planetary systems, even where planets have not been detected. However, debris disks are often only characterized by unresolved infrared excesses that resemble featureless blackbodies, and…
"Pebble snow" describes a planet formation mechanism where icy pebbles in the outer disk reach inner planet embryos as the water ice line evolves inward. We model the effects pebble snow has on sculpting planetary system architectures by…
The boundaries of central place models proved to be fractal lines, which compose fractal texture of central place networks. A textural fractal can be employed to explain the scale-free property of regional boundaries such as border lines,…
A macroscopic characterization of fractals showing up a structural transition from dense to multibranched growth is made using optical diffraction theory. Such fractals are generated via the numerical solution of the 2D Poisson and…
Stars on the lower main sequence (F-type through M-type) have substantial convective envelopes beneath their stellar photospheres. Convection in these regions can couple with rotation to build global-scale structures that may be observable…
Characterizing the surfaces of rocky exoplanets via the scattered light will be an essential challenge to investigate the existence of life on habitable exoplanets. We present a simple reconstruction method for fractional areas of different…
The photometric and spectroscopic signatures of habitable planets orbiting FGK stars may be modulated by surface ice coverage. To estimate its frequency and locations, we simulated the climates of hypothetical planets with a 1D energy…