Related papers: Enceladus's Limit Cycle
Doppler spectroscopy has detected 136 planets around nearby stars. A major puzzle is why their orbits are highly eccentric, while all planets in our Solar System are on nearly circular orbits, as expected if they formed by accretion…
Hot Jupiters are expected to form far from their host star and move toward close-in, circular orbits via a smooth, monotonic decay due to mild and constant tidal dissipation. Yet, three systems have recently been found exhibiting…
Because the solar luminosity increases over geological timescales, Earth climate is expected to warm, increasing water evaporation which, in turn, enhances the atmospheric greenhouse effect. Above a certain critical insolation, this…
The dynamical evolution of a hierarchical three body system is well characterized by the eccentric Kozai-Lidov mechanism, where the inner orbit can undergo large eccentricity and inclination oscillations. It was shown before that starting…
We track the evolution of entropy and black holes in a cyclic universe that undergoes repeated intervals of expansion followed by slow contraction and a smooth (non-singular) bounce. In this kind of cyclic scenario, there is no big crunch…
Tropical cyclones occur over the Earth's tropical oceans, with characteristic genesis regions and tracks tied to the warm ocean surface that provides energy to sustain these storms. The study of tropical cyclogenesis and evolution on Earth…
The Centaur (60558) Echeclus was discovered on March 03, 2000, orbiting between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus. After exhibiting frequent outbursts, it also received a comet designation, 174P. If the ejected material can be a source of…
Divergent migration of planets within a viscous circumstellar disk can engender resonance crossings and dramatic excitation of orbital eccentricities. We provide quantitative criteria for the viability of this mechanism. For the orbits of…
A magma ocean is expected to exist on the dayside of tide-locked planets if surface temperature exceeds the melting temperature of typical crust. As highly prioritized targets for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), more information…
The growth of galaxy clusters is energetic and may trigger and/or quench star formation and black hole activity. The ENISALA project is a collection of multiwavelength observations aimed at understanding how large-scale structure drives…
The Radcliffe wave \cite{2020Natur.578..237A} is a 2.7 kpc long, 100 pc wide-like structure in the Galactic disk with a wave-like velocity structure \cite{2022MNRAS.517L.102L,2024arXiv240212596K}. A referent Nature paper…
We have studied, using molecular dynamics simulations, the pressure-induced melting in a monolayer of soft repulsive spherocylinders whose centers of mass are constrained to move on the surface of a sphere. We show that the orientational…
Glaciations were attributed to variations of the Earths orbit (Milankovitch cycles). But the best ever dated paleoclimatic record (from a speleothem from Devils Hole, Nevada) demonstrated that the end of the last glacial period (termination…
We study tidal dissipation in stars with masses in the range $0.1-1.6 M_\odot$ throughout their evolution, including turbulent effective viscosity acting on equilibrium tides and inertial waves in convection zones, and internal gravity…
We investigate the hypothesis that interactions between a giant planet and the disk from which it forms promote eccentricity growth. These interactions are concentrated at discrete Lindblad and corotation resonances. Interactions at…
Tidal effects in planetary systems are the main driver in the orbital migration of natural satellites. They result from physical processes occurring deep inside celestial bodies, whose effects are rarely observable from surface imaging. For…
We investigate the chemical interaction between Saturn's corotating plasma and Enceladus' volcanic plumes. We evolve plasma as it passes through a prescribed H2O plume using a physical chemistry model adapted for water-group reactions. The…
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 Saturnian coorbital satellites Janus and Epimetheus present a unique dynamical configuration in the Solar System, because of high-amplitude horseshoe orbits, due to a mass ratio of order unity. As a consequence, they swap their orbits…
Minimal energy shapes of closed, elastic shells with twelve pentagonal disclinations introduced in otherwise hexagonally coordinated crystalline lattice are studied. The geometry and the total energy of shells are studied as a function of…