443 research outputs found
Habitable Climate Scenarios for Proxima Centauri b With a Dynamic Ocean
The nearby exoplanet Proxima Centauri b will be a prime future target for
characterization, despite questions about its retention of water. Climate
models with static oceans suggest that an Earth-like Proxima b could harbor a
small dayside region of surface liquid water at fairly warm temperatures
despite its weak instellation. We present the first 3-dimensional climate
simulations of Proxima b with a dynamic ocean. We find that an ocean-covered
Proxima b could have a much broader area of surface liquid water but at much
colder temperatures than previously suggested, due to ocean heat transport and
depression of the freezing point by salinity. Elevated greenhouse gas
concentrations do not necessarily produce more open ocean area because of
possible dynamic regime transitions. For an evolutionary path leading to a
highly saline present ocean, Proxima b could conceivably be an inhabited,
mostly open ocean planet dominated by halophilic life. For an ocean planet in
3:2 spin-orbit resonance, a permanent tropical waterbelt exists for moderate
eccentricity. Simulations of Proxima Centauri b may also be a model for the
habitability of planets receiving similar instellation from slightly cooler or
warmer stars, e.g., in the TRAPPIST-1, LHS 1140, GJ 273, and GJ 3293 systems.Comment: Submitted to Astrobiology; 38 pages, 12 figures, 5 table
Noise generation by shock-turbulence interaction
October 1970Includes bibliographical references (leaf 10)The noise produced by convection of turbulence through an oblique shock wave has been measured and compared to theoretical predictions by Ribner and Kerrebrock. There is excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction that, for a fixed turbulent input, the downstream noise pressure (divided by the mean pressure), should first increase very rapidly, and then decrease as the normal Mach number of the shock is increased from unity to values of the order of 1.5. This behavior implies that a part of the noise from supersonic jets should behave similarly, with a sharp increase, then a decrease as the nozzle pressure ratio is raised from unity.This Research Carried Out in the Gas Turbine Laboratory, M.I.T., in Cooperation with Lewis Research Center, NASA, under Grant NGL 22-009-38
Theory of the Optical Properties of a DNA-Modified Gold Nanoparticle System
We describe a simple model for the melting and optical properties of a
DNA/gold nanoparticle aggregate. The aggregate is modeled as a cluster of gold
nanoparticles on a periodic lattice connected by DNA bonds, and the extinction
coefficient is computed using the discrete dipole approximation. The optical
properties at fixed wavelength change dramatically at the melting transition,
which is found to be higher and narrower in temperature for larger particles,
and much sharper than that of an isolated DNA link. All these features are in
agreement with available experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Physica
Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments with Dynamics 1.0: A General Circulation Model for Simulating the Climates of Rocky Planets
Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments
with Dynamics (ROCKE-3D) is a 3-Dimensional General Circulation Model (GCM)
developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the modeling of
atmospheres of Solar System and exoplanetary terrestrial planets. Its parent
model, known as ModelE2 (Schmidt et al. 2014), is used to simulate modern and
21st Century Earth and near-term paleo-Earth climates. ROCKE-3D is an ongoing
effort to expand the capabilities of ModelE2 to handle a broader range of
atmospheric conditions including higher and lower atmospheric pressures, more
diverse chemistries and compositions, larger and smaller planet radii and
gravity, different rotation rates (slowly rotating to more rapidly rotating
than modern Earth, including synchronous rotation), diverse ocean and land
distributions and topographies, and potential basic biosphere functions. The
first aim of ROCKE-3D is to model planetary atmospheres on terrestrial worlds
within the Solar System such as paleo-Earth, modern and paleo-Mars,
paleo-Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan. By validating the model for a broad range
of temperatures, pressures, and atmospheric constituents we can then expand its
capabilities further to those exoplanetary rocky worlds that have been
discovered in the past and those to be discovered in the future. We discuss the
current and near-future capabilities of ROCKE-3D as a community model for
studying planetary and exoplanetary atmospheres.Comment: Revisions since previous draft. Now submitted to Astrophysical
Journal Supplement Serie
Spectral signatures of photosynthesis II: coevolution with other stars and the atmosphere on extrasolar worlds
As photosynthesis on Earth produces the primary signatures of life that can
be detected astronomically at the global scale, a strong focus of the search
for extrasolar life will be photosynthesis, particularly photosynthesis that
has evolved with a different parent star. We take planetary atmospheric
compositions simulated by Segura, et al. (2003, 2005) for Earth-like planets
around observed F2V and K2V stars, modeled M1V and M5V stars, and around the
active M4.5V star AD Leo; our scenarios use Earth's atmospheric composition as
well as very low O2 content in case anoxygenic photosynthesis dominates. We
calculate the incident spectral photon flux densities at the surface of the
planet and under water. We identify bands of available photosynthetically
relevant radiation and find that photosynthetic pigments on planets around F2V
stars may peak in absorbance in the blue, K2V in the red-orange, and M stars in
the NIR, in bands at 0.93-1.1 microns, 1.1-1.4 microns, 1.5-1.8 microns, and
1.8-2.5 microns. In addition, we calculate wavelength restrictions for
underwater organisms and depths of water at which they would be protected from
UV flares in the early life of M stars. We estimate the potential productivity
for both surface and underwater photosynthesis, for both oxygenic and
anoxygenic photosynthesis, and for hypothetical photosynthesis in which longer
wavelength, multi-photosystem series are used.Comment: 59 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, forthcoming in Astrobiology ~March
200
Intensity measurement bend sensors based on periodically tapered soft glass fibers
We demonstrate a novel technique for tapering periodically an all-solid soft glass fiber, consisting of two types of lead silicate glasses, by the use of a focused CO2 laser beam and investigate the bend sensing applications of the periodically-tapered soft glass fiber. Such a soft glass fiber with periodic microtapers could be used to develop promising bend sensors with a sensitivity of -27.75 µW/m-1 by means of measuring the bend-induced change of light intensity. The proposed bend sensor exhibits a very low measurement error of down to ±1%
Multi-Scale Morphological Analysis of SDSS DR5 Survey using the Metric Space Technique
Following novel development and adaptation of the Metric Space Technique
(MST), a multi-scale morphological analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) Data Release 5 (DR5) was performed. The technique was adapted to perform
a space-scale morphological analysis by filtering the galaxy point
distributions with a smoothing Gaussian function, thus giving quantitative
structural information on all size scales between 5 and 250 Mpc. The analysis
was performed on a dozen slices of a volume of space containing many newly
measured galaxies from the SDSS DR5 survey. Using the MST, observational data
were compared to galaxy samples taken from N-body simulations with current best
estimates of cosmological parameters and from random catalogs. By using the
maximal ranking method among MST output functions we also develop a way to
quantify the overall similarity of the observed samples with the simulated
samples
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