相关论文: Moving mountains and white spots of Ceres
A diurnal varying haze layer at the bright spots of Occator on dwarf planet Ceres has been reported from images of the Dawn Framing Camera. This finding is supported by ground-based observations revealing diurnal albedo changes at Occator's…
Ceres, the dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt, hosts heavily cratered surfaces where craters are continuously eroded mainly due to impact bombardment with a limited influence by non-impact processes. Over continuous bombardment, such…
The recent widespread thaw of permafrost has led to observations of explosive gas emissions, which expel ice and soil debris and leave behind large craters. This phenomenon appears to be caused by a buildup of pressure from below the…
The surface conditions of terrestrial bodies strongly reflect their geological evolutionary processes and vary among various terrestrial bodies. This diversity is attributed to variations in the timescales of boulder formation through…
Variations and spatial distributions of bright and dark material on dwarf planet Ceres play a key role in understanding the processes that have led to its present surface composition. We define limits for bright and dark material in order…
Ceres is the largest body in the Main Belt, and it is characterized by a large abundance of water ice in its interior. This feature is suggested by its relatively low bulk density (2162 kg m$^{-3}$), while its partial differentiation into a…
High resolution images of Mercury's surface, from the MESSENGER spacecraft, reveal many bright deposits associated with irregular, shallow, rimless depressions whose origins were attributed to volatile-related activity, but absent…
Mountain ranges, volcanoes, trenches, and craters are common on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System, and we might we expect the same for rocky exoplanets. With ever larger telescopes under design and a growing need to not just detect…
The primary astrophysical source of the rare earth elements is the rapid neutron capture process ($r$ process). The rare earth peak that is seen in the solar $r$-process residuals has been proposed to originate as a pile-up of nuclei during…
Craters formed by the impact of agglomerated materials are commonly observed in nature, such as asteroids colliding with planets and moons. In this paper, we investigate how the projectile spin and cohesion lead to different crater shapes.…
Mysterious craters, with anomalously high concentrations of methane, have formed in the Yamal and Taymyr peninsulas of Siberia since 2014. While thawing permafrost owing to climate warming promotes methane releases, it is unknown how such…
Stellar surface processes represent a fundamental limit to the detection of extrasolar planets with the currently most heavily-used techniques. As such, considerable effort has gone into trying to mitigate the impact of these processes on…
The elastic crust of a neutron star fractures repeatedly as it spins down electromagnetically. An idealised, macroscopic model of inhomogeneous crustal failure is presented based on a cellular automaton with nearest-neighbour tectonic…
Warm giant planets with orbital periods of tens of days exhibit a positive correlation between mass and eccentricity. We interpret this trend as the outcome of planet-planet scattering, representing a transition from collision-dominated…
Gravitational, magnetic and superfluid forces can stress the crust of an evolving neutron star. Fracture of the crust under these stresses could affect the star's spin evolution and generate high-energy emission. We study the growth of…
Bright features have been recently discovered by Dawn on Ceres, which extend previous photometric and Space Telescope observations. These features should produce distortions of the line profiles of the reflected solar spectrum and therefore…
The persistent increases in spin-down rate offsets seen to accompany glitches in the Crab and other pulsars suggest increases in the spin-down torque. We interpret these offsets as due to starquakes occurring as the star spins down and the…
The origin of hot Jupiters -- gas giant exoplanets orbiting very close to their host stars -- is a long-standing puzzle. Planet formation theories suggest that such planets are unlikely to have formed in-situ but instead may have formed at…
Observational constraints on planet spin-axis has recently become possible, and revealed a system that favors a large spin-axis misalignment, a low stellar spin-orbit misalignment and a high eccentricity. To explain the origin of such…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…