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Planets are often covered with thin cracked shells. From mud films to lithospheres of rock or ice, fracture networks form two-dimensional (2D) tessellations of convex polygons whose geometry encodes their genesis. Here we chart the geometry…
Imaging and resolved spectroscopy reveal varying environmental conditions in our dynamic solar system. Many key advances have focused on how these conditions change over time. Observatory-level commitments to conduct annual observations of…
JWST has shown that CO2 and CO are common on the surfaces of objects in the Kuiper belt and have apparent surface coverages even higher than that of water ice, though water ice is expected to be significantly more abundant in the bulk…
An admittedly pedantic but hopefully useful and informative analysis is presented of the EUVE 70--180 Angstrom spectra of nine polars. These spectra are fit with three different models---a blackbody, a pure-H stellar atmosphere, and a solar…
In dense clouds of the interstellar medium, dust grains are covered by ice mantles, dominated by H$_2$O. CO and CO$_2$ are common ice components observed in infrared spectra, while infrared inactive N$_2$ is expected to be present in the…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
The evolution of Europa's water-product exosphere over its 85-hour day, based on current models, has not been shown to exhibit any diurnal asymmetries. Here we simulate Europa's exosphere using a 3-D Monte Carlo routine including, for the…
Europa is an icy ocean world, differentiated into a floating ice shell and solid interior, separated by a global ocean. The classical spin-orbit coupling problem considers a satellite as a single rigid body, but in the case of Europa, the…
The James Webb Space Telescope and the future Habitable Worlds Observatory aim to discover exoplanet atmospheric spectra that detect life. Currently, most existing spectral "retrieval" algorithms focus on inferring the abundances of…
Europa's leading hemisphere chaos regions have a spectral feature at 450 nm that has been attributed to absorption by crystal defects in irradiated sodium chloride, known as F-centers. Some discrepancies exist between the laboratory data of…
In view of promising applications of fractal nanostructures, we analyze the spectra of quantum particles in the Sierpinski carpet and study the non-correlated electron gas in this geometry. We show that the spectrum exhibits scale…
Experimental efforts to measure neutrinos by radio-frequency (RF) signals resulting from neutrino interactions in-ice have intensified over the last decade. Recent calculations indicate that one may dramatically improve the sensitivity of…
We analyzed spectral cubes of Callisto's leading and trailing hemispheres, collected with the NIRSpec Integrated Field Unit (G395H) on the James Webb Space Telescope. These spatially resolved data show strong 4.25-micron absorption bands…
Due to climate change, heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense, with western Europe experiencing the strongest trends in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Part of the temperature trends are caused by circulation changes, which…
Quantifying kinetic energy (KE) and enstrophy transfer, mixing, and dissipation in the Arctic Ocean is key to understanding polar ocean dynamics, which are critical components of the global climate system. However, in ice-covered regions,…
The surface of Europa contains many quasi-circular morphologies called lenticulae. Although the formation mechanism of lenticulae is not understood, sill intrusion from the subsurface ocean is one promising hypothesis. However, it remains…
The New Horizons spacecraft mapped colors and infrared spectra across the encounter hemispheres of Pluto and Charon. The volatile ices CH$_4$, CO, and N$_2$, that dominate Pluto's surface, have complicated spatial distributions resulting…
Currently ~36 different absorption bands have been detected in the infrared spectra of cold, dense interstellar and circumstellar environments. These are attributed to the vibrational transitions of ~17 different molecules frozen on dust…
Context. The crust composition of rocky exoplanets with a substantial atmosphere can not be observed directly. However, recent developments start to allow the observation and characterisation of their atmospheres. Aims. We aim to establish…
Electron irradiation of water-rich ices plays a significant role in initiating the chemical and physical processes on the surface of airless icy bodies in radiation environments such as Europa and Enceladus, as well as on the Moon, comets,…