Related papers: An additional planet as a model for the Pleistocen…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
Given a solar luminosity L_Ar = 0.75 L_0 at the beginning of the Archean 3.8 Gyr ago, where L_0 is the present-day one, if the heliocentric distance r of the Earth was r_Ar = 0.956 r_0, the solar irradiance would have been as large as I_Ar…
Several clues indicate that Titan's atmosphere has been depleted in methane during some period of its history, possibly as recently as 0.5-1 billion years ago. It could also happen in the future. Under these conditions, the atmosphere…
Recent observations suggest that many planetary-mass objects may be present in the outer solar system between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. Gravitational perturbations may occasionally bring them into the inner solar system. Their…
Orbital forcing plays a key role in pacing the glacial-interglacial cycles. However, the mechanistic linkages between the orbital parameters - eccentricity, obliquity, and precession - and global ice volume remain unclear. Here, we…
During the Precambrian era, Earth's decelerating rotation would have passed a 21-hour period that would have been resonant with the semidiurnal atmospheric thermal tide. Near this point, the atmospheric torque would have been maximized,…
Planets grow in rotating disks of dust and gas around forming stars, some of which can subsequently collide in giant impacts after the gas component is removed from the disk. Monitoring programs with the warm Spitzer mission have recorded…
The Moon migrated to $r_{\leftmoon}\simeq3.8\times10^{10}$ cm over a characteristic time $r/v=10^{10}$ Gyr by tidal interaction with the Earth's oceans at a present velocity of $v=3.8$ cm yr$^{-1}$. We derive scaling of global dissipation…
We investigate whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. Several global surface temperature records since 1850 and records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar…
The New Horizons spacecraft has found evidence for geologic activity on the surface of Pluto, including extensional tectonic deformation of its water ice bedrock (see Moore et al., 2016). One mechanism that could drive extensional tectonic…
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), which marked the transition from an anoxic to an oxygenated atmosphere, occurred 2.4 billion years ago on Earth, several hundreds of millions of years after the emergence of oxygenic photosynthesis. This…
In order to understand the climate on terrestrial planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, one would like to know their thermal inertia. We use a global climate model to simulate the thermal phase variations of Earth-analogs and test whether…
A distinct population of planetary systems that contain dynamically isolated, Earth-size planets with orbital periods $P_\mathrm{orb}\sim 1\,$day was recently identified in an analysis of data from the Kepler planet candidate catalog. We…
The Earth's climate has experienced numerous critical transitions during its history, which have often been accompanied by massive and rapid changes in the biosphere. Such transitions are evidenced in various proxy records covering…
Passing stars (also called stellar flybys) have notable effects on the solar system's long-term dynamical evolution, injection of Oort cloud comets into the solar system, properties of trans-Neptunian objects, and more. Based on a…
The present Martian climate is characterized by a cold and dry environment with a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxides (CO2). In such conditions, the planetary climate and habitability are determined by the distribution of CO2 between…
Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere.…
Data from the Planck satellite imply new dates for the major eras of the universe. The era of radiation ended 50,150 years after inflation and the era of matter 10.31 billion years after inflation or 3.51 billion years ago.
When analyzing the mean-year trend of the Earth's surface temperature for the past 140 years one can discern two sections of monotone linear increase of temperature during two last industrial centuries. The first one begins somewhere in the…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…