相关论文: The Pluto System After New Horizons
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft discovered fields of sub-parallel sets of steep ridges situated in the high-altitude, low-latitude regions in Pluto's encounter hemisphere called 'bladed terrain'. Thought to be formed due to sublimational…
Exo-Kuiper belts have been observed for decades, but the recent detection of gas in some of them may change our view of the Solar System's youth. Late gas produced by the sublimation of CO (or CO$_2$) ices after the dissipation of the…
This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…
Predicting the rate of escape and thermal structure of Pluto's upper atmosphere in preparation for the New Horizons Spacecraft encounter in 2015 is important for planning and interpreting the expected measurements. Having a moderate Jeans…
Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are remnants of a collisionally and dynamically evolved planetesimal disk in the outer solar system. This complex structure, known as the trans-Neptunian belt (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt), can reveal important…
The detection and characterization of exoplanets have made huge progresses since the first discoveries in the late nineties. In particular, the independent measurement of the mass and radius of planets, by combining the transit and…
The history of the outer solar system is intrinsically related to the Giant Planets migration. A massive disk of material within a radius of 30~au was scattered during the planetary migration, creating different dynamic populations in the…
The Pluto-Charon system, likely formed from an impact, has reached the endpoint of its tidal evolution. During its evolution into the dual-synchronous state, the equilibrium tidal figures of Pluto and Charon would have also evolved as…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
Exoplanet science is booming. In 20 years our knowledge has expanded considerably, from the first discovery of a Hot Jupiter, to the detection of a large population of Neptunes and super-Earths, to the first steps toward the…
Observations of the Pluto-Charon system, acquired with the ALMA interferometer on June 12-13, 2015, have yielded a detection of the CO(3-2) and HCN(4-3) rotational transitions from Pluto, providing a strong confirmation of the presence of…
During its departure from Pluto, New Horizons used its LORRI camera to image a portion of Pluto's southern hemisphere that was in a decades-long seasonal winter darkness, but still very faintly illuminated by sunlight reflected by Charon.…
With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
This paper reports the discovery and orbital characterization of two extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs), 2016 QV$_{89}$ and 2016 QU$_{89}$, which have orbits that appear similar to that of a previously known object, 2013 UH$_{15}$. All…
The radio tracking apparatus of the New Horizons spacecraft, currently traveling to the Pluto system where its arrival is scheduled for July 2015, should be able to reach an accuracy of 10 m (range) and 0.1 mm s^-1 (range-rate) over…
Sputnik Planitia, Pluto's gigantic ice glacier, hosts numerous scientific mysteries, including the presence of thousands of elongated pit structures. We examine various attributes of these pit structures in New Horizons data sets, revealing…
Uranus and Neptune, and their diverse satellite and ring systems, represent the least explored environments of our Solar System, and yet may provide the archetype for the most common outcome of planetary formation throughout our galaxy. Ice…
We present new astrometry of Pluto's three satellites from images taken of the Pluto system during 2002-3 with the High Resolution Camera (HRC) mode of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The…
The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto on July 14, 2015, revealed the presence of haze in Pluto's atmosphere that were formed by CH4/N2 photochemistry at high altitudes in Pluto's atmosphere, as on Titan and Triton. In order to…