Related papers: A youthful Titan implied by improved impact simula…
The details of the Solar system's formation are still heavily debated. Questions remain about the formation locations of the giant planets, and the degree to which volatile material was mixed throughout the proto-planetary system. One…
Titan's northern high latitudes host many large hydrocarbon lakes. Like water lakes on Earth, Titan's lakes are constantly subject to evaporation. This process strongly affects the atmospheric methane abundance, the atmospheric temperature,…
Clouds on Titan result from the condensation of methane and ethane and, as on other planets, are primarily structured by circulation of the atmosphere. At present, cloud activity mainly occurs in the southern (summer) hemisphere, arising…
Titan has a climate system with similarities to Earth, including the presence of a thick atmosphere made up of several atmospheric layers. As on Earth, Titan's climate is influenced by several factors: the gaseous species making up the…
With the Cassini-Huygens Mission in orbit around Saturn, the large moon Titan, with its reducing atmosphere, rich organic chemistry, and heterogeneous surface, moves into the astrobiological spotlight. Environmental conditions on Titan and…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
The disruption of an icy moon in a collision with an interloping comet a few hundred million years ago is a simple way to create Saturn's rings. A ring parent moon with a mass comparable to Mimas could be trapped in mean motion resonance…
We present results of an investigation into the formation of nitrogen-bearing molecules in the atmosphere of Titan. We extend a previous model (Li et al. 2015, 2016) to cover the region below the tropopause, so the new model treats the…
We retrieve vertical and meridional variations of methane mole fraction in Titan's lower troposphere by re-analyzing near-infrared ground-based observations from 17 July 2014 UT (Adamkovics et al., 2016). We generate synthetic spectra using…
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has revealed the complex geology of Pluto and Charon. Pluto's encounter hemisphere shows ongoing surface geological activity centered on a vast basin containing a thick layer of volatile ices that appears to…
It is widely accepted that Titan and the mid-sized regular satellites around Saturn were formed in the circum-Saturn disk. Thus, if these mid-sized satellites were simply accreted by collisions of similar ice-rock satellitesimals in the…
We use a statistical thermodynamic approach to determine the composition of clathrate hydrates which may form from a multiple compound gas whose composition is similar to that of Titan's atmosphere. Assuming that noble gases are initially…
The chemical environments of young planets are assumed to be largely influenced by impacts of bodies lingering on unstable trajectories after the dissolution of the protoplanetary disk. We explore the chemical consequences of impacts within…
Seasonal variation is significant in Titan's atmosphere due to the large change of solar insolation resulting from Titan's 26.7{\deg} axial tilt relative to the plane of Saturn's orbit. Here we present an investigation of hydrocarbon and…
The Saturnian moon Titan has a thick, organic-rich atmosphere, and condensed phases of small organic molecules are anticipated to be stable on its surface. Of particular importance are crystalline phases of organics, known as cryominerals,…
Images from instruments on Cassini as well as from telescopes on the ground reveal the presence of sporadic small-scale cloud activity in the cold late-winter north polar of Saturn's large moon Titan. These clouds lie underneath the…
Saturn's rings consist of a huge number of water ice particles, with a tiny addition of rocky material. They form a flat disk, as the result of an interplay of angular momentum conservation and the steady loss of energy in dissipative…
Titan has a diverse range of materials in its atmosphere and on its surface: the simple organics that reside in various phases (gas, liquid, ice) and the solid complex refractory organics that form Titan's haze layers. These materials all…
We calculate the expected flux profile of comets into the planetary system from the Oort cloud arising from Galactic tides and encounters with molecular clouds. We find that both periodic and sporadic bombardment episodes, with amplitudes…
We describe a scenario of Titan's formation matching the constraints imposed by its current atmospheric composition. Assuming that the abundances of all elements, including oxygen, are solar in the outer nebula, we show that the icy…