Capillary processes in extraterrestrial contexts

Abstract

The Earth is no longer the only known celestial body containing one or more liquid phases. The Cassini spacecraft has discovered seas of hydrocarbons at the surface of Titan, while a series of corroborating evidences argue in favour of the existence of an aqueous ocean beneath the icy crust of several moons. Capillarity embraces a family of physical processes occurring at the free surface of a liquid. These phenomena depend on the liquid properties and on the local planetary conditions. Capillarity may have important direct or indirect implications on the geoscientific and astrobiological points of view. In this paper, we discuss capillarity physics among solar system objects and expected consequences for planetary science.

This paper is accepted in "Journal of Geophysical Research: Planet". Data and softwares are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10391618

References in corpus (11)

• Warming early Mars with CO2 and H2
• On the physics of fizzing: How bubble bursting controls droplets ejection
• An Exomoon Survey of 70 Cool Giant Exoplanets and the New Candidate Kepler-1708 b-i
• Morphology Scaling of Drop Impact onto a Granular Layer
• A Lower Limit of Atmospheric Pressure on Early Mars Inferred from Nitrogen and Argon Isotopic Compositions
• Blue, white, and red ocean planets - Simulations of orbital variations in flux and polarization colors
• The floatability of aerosols and waves damping on Titan's seas
• Photometrically-corrected global infrared mosaics of Enceladus: New implications for its spectral diversity and geological activity
• The Fate of Simple Organics on Titan's Surface: A Theoretical Perspective
• Vertical compositional variations of liquid hydrocarbons in Titan's alkanofers
• 3-D Global modelling of the early martian climate under a dense CO2+H2 atmosphere and for a wide range of surface water inventories