Pluto’s small satellites have very low escape velocities, which means that dust kicked up by impacts has a relatively easy time of escaping rather than settling back down to the little moon’s surface. Today’s paper looks at the fates of that dust.
Planets orbiting close to type-M dwarf stars are in the habitable zone, but if their orbits are in a 3:2 spin resonance, do their long, strange days and nights have a chance of supporting photosynthetic life?
For planets too old for plate tectonics, a companion planet could drive tidal heating to keep conditions primed for life.
In search of a good origin story for the building blocks of life, the authors of this paper have set their sights higher. Literally higher, to exoplanets’ skies.