Related papers: Understanding Compositional Evolution of Hollows a…
A thermophysical model was developed to test the viability of 57 candidate hollow-forming volatiles within the hollow-formation model framework of Blewett et al. (2013). We find that the thermophysical properties of elemental sulfur (S)…
High resolution images of Mercury's surface, from the MESSENGER spacecraft, reveal many bright deposits associated with irregular, shallow, rimless depressions whose origins were attributed to volatile-related activity, but absent…
The chemical composition of a planetary body reflects its starting conditions modified by numerous processes during its formation and geological evolution. Measurements by X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutron spectrometers on the MESSENGER…
Pit craters are circular to subcircular depressions that lack a rim and ejecta layer and typically have a conical shape. There are several mechanisms that can explain the formation of such depressions and they are associated with collapse…
It has been found that periodically closely spaced vacancies on a graphite sheet cause a significant rearrange-ment of its electronic spectrum: metallic waveguides with a high density of states near the Fermi level are formed along the…
The local environment is ideal for searching out compact dark structures via the microlensing and multi-frequency emissions as these objects are expected to be faint and microlensing experiments have already hinted at their possibility. In…
We present a comprehensive evolutionary model of the Sun's protoplanetary disk, constructed to resolve the "CAI Storage" problem of meteoritics. We predict the abundances of calcium-rich, aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and refractory…
In this paper, we investigate the dynamical formation and evolution of 2 + 1-dimensional charged black holes. We numerically study dynamical collapses of charged matter fields in an anti de Sitter background and note the formation of black…
We study the formation and decay of electron-hole droplets in diamonds at both low and high temperatures under different excitations by master equations. The calculation reveals that at low temperature the kinetics of the system behaves as…
Dust grains of crystalline silicate, which are rarely presented in interstellar space, were found in cometary nuclei. These crystalline silicates are thought to have formed by annealing of amorphous silicate grains or direct condensation of…
The local stellar halo of the Milky Way contains the debris from several past accretion events. Here we study in detail the structure and properties of nearby debris associated with the Helmi streams, originally identified as an overdensity…
Mercury, the innermost planet, formed under highly reduced conditions, based mainly on surface Fe, S, and Si abundances determined from MESSENGER mission data. The minor element Cr may serve as an independent oxybarometer, but only very…
The detection of geologically recent channels at the end of the twentieth century rapidly suggested that liquid water could have been present on Mars up to recent times. A mechanism involving melting of water ice during ice ages in the last…
Density functional theory (DFT) is widely used to study defects in monolayer graphene with a view to applications ranging from water filtration to electronics to investigation of radiation damage in graphite moderators. To assess the…
Volatile molecules are critical to terrestrial planetary habitability, yet difficult to observe directly where planets form at the midplanes of protoplanetary disks. It is unclear whether the inner 1 AU of disks are volatile-poor or if this…
In the giant impact theory for lunar origin, the Moon forms from material ejected by the impact into an Earth-orbiting disk. Here we report the initial results from a silicate melt-vapor equilibrium chemistry model for such impact-generated…
We investigate the idea that the interaction of Dark Matter (DM) sub-halos with the gaseous disk of galaxies can be the origin for the observed holes and shells found in their neutral hydrogen (HI) distributions. We use high resolution…
The signatures of dust processing and grain growth - related to the formation of rocky planets - are easily seen in mid-infrared spectral features. One important diagnostic tool in this context is the silicate feature in the spectra of…
In order to investigate the interaction between single vacancies in a graphene sheet, we have used spin-polarized density functional theory (DFT). Two distinct configurations were considered, either with the two vacancies located in the…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…