Related papers: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
It has been proposed that the Galaxy might contain a population of cold clouds in numbers sufficient to account for a substantial fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. These clouds would have masses of the order of 10^{-3} Solar mass…
Winds from massive stars have velocities of 1000 km/s or more, and produce hot, high pressure gas when they shock. We develop a theory for the evolution of bubbles driven by the collective winds from star clusters early in their lifetimes,…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
We study a rumour model from a percolation theory and branching process point of view. The existence of a giant component is related to the event where the rumour spreads out trough an infinite number of individuals. We present sharp lower…
The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…
Astrophysical gases such as the interstellar-, circumgalactic- or intracluster-medium are commonly multiphase, which poses the question of the structure of these systems. While there are many known processes leading to fragmentation of cold…
More often than not a lunch time conversation will veer off into bizarre and uncharted territories. In rare instances these frontiers of conversation can lead to deep insights about the Universe we inhabit. This paper details the fruits of…
Condensation in cumulus clouds plays a key role in structuring the mean, non-precipitating trade-wind boundary layer. Here, we summarise how this role also explains the spontaneous growth of mesoscale ($>O(10)$ km) fluctuations in clouds…
Storms operated by moist convection and the condensation of $\rm CH_{4}$ or $\rm H_{2}S$ have been observed on Uranus and Neptune. However, the mechanism of cloud formation, thermal structure, and mixing efficiency of ice giant weather…
In conventional models of galactic and cluster cooling flows widespread cooling (mass dropout) is assumed to avoid accumulation of unacceptably large central masses. However, recent XMM observations have failed to find spectral evidence for…
Cloudy atmospheres produce electric discharges, including lightning. Lightning, in turn, provides sufficient energy to break down air molecules into reactive species and thereby affects the atmospheric composition. The climate of tidally…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
Galaxies comprise intricate networks of interdependent processes which together govern their evolution. Central among these are the multiplicity of feedback channels, which remain incompletely understood. One outstanding problem is the…
In recent years, numerical models that were developed for Earth have been adapted to study exoplanetary climates to understand how the broad range of possible exoplanetary properties affects their climate state. The recent discovery and…
The most recent observational evidence seems to indicate that giant molecular clouds are predominantly gravitationally unbound objects. In this paper we show that this is a natural consequence of a scenario in which cloud-cloud collisions…
Habitable planets are commonly imagined to be temperate planets like Earth, with areas of open ocean and warm land. In contrast, planets in snowball states, where oceans are entirely ice-covered, are believed to be inhospitable. However, we…
We explore whether observed molecular clouds could include a substantial population of unbound clouds. Using simulations which include only turbulence and gravity, we are able to match observed relations and naturally reproduce the observed…
The topology of large scale structure is studied as a function of galaxy type using the genus statistic. In hydrodynamical cosmological CDM simulations, galaxies form on caustic surfaces (Zeldovich pancakes) then slowly drain onto filaments…
Understanding the survival, growth and dynamics of cold gas is fundamental to galaxy formation. While there has been a plethora of work on `wind tunnel' simulations that study such cold gas in winds, the infall of this gas under gravity is…
Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical…