Related papers: Liquid Water Oceans in Ice Giants
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is the only extraterrestrial body known to support stable liquid on its surface, in the form of seas and lakes that dot the polar regions. Many indications suggest that the liquid should be composed of a…
The demographics of sub-Jovian planets around low-mass stars is dominated by populations of ``sub-Neptunes" and ``super-Earths", distinguished by the presence or absence of envelopes of low-molecular weight volatiles, i.e., H2, He, and H2O.…
Temperate sub-Neptunes are compelling targets for detecting liquid-water oceans beyond the Solar System. If water-rich and lacking massive hydrogen-helium envelopes, these planets could sustain liquid layers beneath their atmospheres…
Exoplanets orbiting close to their parent stars could lose some fraction of their atmospheres because of the extreme irradiation. Atmospheric mass loss primarily affects low-mass exoplanets, leading to suggest that hot rocky planets might…
Many sub-Neptune exoplanets have been believed to be composed of a thick hydrogen-dominated atmosphere and a high-temperature heavier-element-dominant core. From an assumption that there is no chemical reaction between hydrogen and…
Water and hydrogen at high pressure make up a substantial fraction of the interiors of giant planets. Using ab initio random structure search methods we investigate the ground-state crystal structures of water, hydrogen, and hydrogen-oxygen…
Some super Earths and mini Neptunes will likely have thick atmospheres that are not H2-dominated. We have developed a photochemistry-thermochemistry kinetic-transport model for exploring the compositions of thick atmospheres on super Earths…
The observed masses and radii of sub-Neptunes are typically explained by the gas dwarf and the water world scenarios. While their evolutionary history on a population level has been proposed as a method to distinguish between these…
For most planets in the range of radii from 1 to 4 R$_{\oplus}$, water is a major component of the interior composition. At high pressure H${}_{2}$O can be solid, but for larger planets, like Neptune, the temperature can be too high for…
Turbulence is indispensable to redistribute nutrients for all life forms larger than microbial, on land and in the ocean. Yet, the development of deep-sea turbulence was not studied in three dimensions to date. As a disproportionate…
Exoplanets with substantial Hydrogen/Helium atmospheres have been discovered in abundance, many residing extremely close to their parent stars. The extreme irradiation levels these atmospheres experience causes them to undergo hydrodynamic…
We present and analyze three-dimensional data cubes of Neptune from the OSIRIS integral-field spectrograph on the 10-m Keck telescope, from July 2009. These data have a spatial resolution of 0.035"/pixel and spectral resolution of R~3800 in…
Jupiter's deep abundances help to constrain the formation history of the planet and the environment of the protoplanetary nebula. Juno recently measured Jupiter's deep oxygen abundance near the equator to be 2.2$_{-2.1}^{+3.9}$ times the…
Despite the low solar irradiation it receives, Neptune shows a very active atmosphere with some of the most intense dynamics observed in Solar System atmospheres. Characterizing the atmospheric temperature profiles of the planet is a key to…
Heterogeneous ice growth exhibits a maximum in freezing rate arising from the competition between kinetics and the thermodynamic driving force between the solid and liquid states. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the…
Water photolysis and hydrogen loss from the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets is of fundamental importance to climate evolution but remains poorly understood in general. Here we present a range of calculations we performed to study…
Mature neutron stars are cold enough to contain a number of superfluid and superconducting components. These systems are distinguished by the presence of additional dynamical degrees of freedom associated with superfluidity. In order to…
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…
Liquid water is not only of obvious importance but also extremely intriguing, displaying many anomalies that still challenge our understanding of such an a priori simple system. The same is true when looking at nanoconfined water: The…
The structures of the outer atmospheres of red giants are very complex. The notion of large optically thick molecular spheres around the stars (MOLspheres) has been invoked in order to explain e.g. spectro-interferometric observations.…