Related papers: A youthful Titan implied by improved impact simula…
Saturn's moon Titan undergoes a long annual cycle of 29.45 Earth years. Titan's northern winter and spring were investigated in detail by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft (2004-2017), but the northern summer season remains sparsely studied.…
Pluto has been observed by the New Horizons space probe to have some relatively fresh ice on the old ices covering most of the surface. Pluto was thought to consist of only a rocky core below the ice. Here I show that Pluto can have an iron…
The New Horizons spacecraft returned images and compositional data showing that terrains on Pluto span a variety of ages, ranging from relatively ancient, heavily cratered areas to very young surfaces with few-to-no impact craters. One of…
In this paper we present a crater age determination of several terrains associated with the Raditladi and Rachmaninoff basins. These basins were discovered during the first and third MESSENGER flybys of Mercury, respectively. One of the…
The Cassini-Huygens space mission revealed that Titan s thick brownish haze is initiated high in the atmosphere at about 1000 km of altitude, before a slow transportation down to the surface. Close to the surface at altitudes below 130 km,…
Clays control carbon, water and nutrient transport in the lithosphere, promote cloud formation5 and lubricate fault slip through interactions among hydrated mineral interfaces. Clay mineral properties are difficult to model because their…
We mapped all boulders larger than 105 m on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres using images of the Dawn framing camera acquired in the Low Altitude Mapping Orbit (LAMO). We find that boulders on Ceres are more numerous towards high latitudes…
Galaxy interactions are known to trigger starbursts. The young star clusters formed in mergers may be young globular clusters. The ages of these young star clusters yield the timing of interaction-triggered star formation and provide an…
A habitable zone of a star is defined as a range of orbits within which a rocky planet can support liquid water on its surface. The most intriguing question driving the search for habitable planets is whether they host life. But is the age…
The Cassini-Huygens mission detected large negative ions in Titan's ionosphere at pressures as low as $10^{-6}$ torr. These ions ultimately polymerize to form Titan's complex organic haze particles, which are observed throughout the…
We report the discovery, mass, and radius determination of TOI-1801 b, a temperate mini-Neptune around a young M dwarf. TOI-1801 b was observed in TESS sectors 22 and 49, and the alert that this was a TESS planet candidate with a period of…
Phase-space data, chemistry, and ages together reveal a complex structure in the outer low-${\alpha}$ disc of the Milky Way. The age-vertical velocity dispersion profiles beyond the Solar Neighbourhood show a significant jump at 6 Gyr for…
On Mars, a relatively pure water ice layer lies beneath several centimeters of dry soil at mid-latitudes. Its widespread presence poleward of 60{\deg} latitude was detected by remote neutron spectroscopy and confirmed by the Phoenix lander…
Models and observations suggest that ice-particle aggregation at and beyond the snowline dominates the earliest stages of planet-formation, which therefore is subject to many laboratory studies. However, the pressure-temperature gradients…
Traditional thermal evolution models of giant planets employ arbitrary initial conditions selected more for computational expediency than physical accuracy. Since the initial conditions are eventually forgotten by the evolving planet, this…
In this chapter we begin with a review of Titan's fluvial and lacustrine landscapes as observed with Cassini remote sensing data, and what the many discoveries have revealed about Titan's surface materials and climate. Yet Cassini remote…
Subsequent to the Moon's formation, late accretion to the terrestrial planets strongly modified the physical and chemical nature of silicate crusts and mantles. This alteration came in the form of melting through impacts, as well as the…
A large drift in the rotation rate of Titan observed by Cassini provided the first evidence of a subsurface ocean isolating the massive core from the icy crust. Seasonal exchange of angular momentum between the surface and atmosphere…
The Cassini-Huygens mission measured the chemical abundances of the major components of Titan's atmosphere, and analyses of the data revealed several as-yet unexplained anomalies in the methane and hydrogen profiles. We model the…
Mercury has an unusually large metal core comprising ~70% of its mass comparing to all other terrestrial planets in the solar system. Giant impacts can remove a significant fraction of the silicate mantle of a chondritic proto-Mercury and…