Planetary science articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article |

    Few high-pressure polymorphs have been found from lunar meteorites even though the moon has experienced heavy meteorite bombardment. This study presents evidence of a high-pressure polymorph of silica—seifertite—from a lunar meteorite; a record of an intense planetary collision on the moon ~2.7 Ga ago.

    • Masaaki Miyahara
    • , Shohei Kaneko
    •  & Naohisa Hirao

  • Article |

    Recently, the NASA MESSENGER mission reported signatures of Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities in the magnetic environment of Mercury. Using global hybrid kinetic simulations, Paral and Rankin reproduce these observations, revealing a dawn–dusk asymmetry in the instability.

    • Jan Paral
    •  & Robert Rankin

  • Article |

    The atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, consists of orange-yellow haze, but its formation and dynamics are not well understood. Here laboratory studies show that Titan’s lower atmosphere is photochemically active and the formation of complex prebiotic precursor molecules occurs at lower altitudes.

    • Murthy S. Gudipati
    • , Ronen Jacovi
    •  & Mark Allen

  • Article |

    High-pressure minerals in meteorites reflect the conditions prevailing when they were excavated and launched from their parent bodies. Tissint—a recent Martian meteorite—contains an unusual number of large high-pressure minerals, suggesting excavation from an impact of larger magnitude than for previous Martian samples.

    • Ioannis P. Baziotis
    • , Yang Liu
    •  & Lawrence A. Taylor

  • Article |

    Dating the age of meteorites can tell us when asteroids formed, but uncertainty remains in the Mn–Cr chronometry. This study presents a method for improving Mn/Cr determination and reports an age of 4,563.4 million years ago for carbonates in CM chondrites, which is younger than previous estimates.

    • Wataru Fujiya
    • , Naoji Sugiura
    •  & Yuji Sano

  • Article |

    The unusual magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune are important considerations when developing hydrodynamic models of the planetary interiors. In this study, molecular dynamics simulations are used to study how chemical processes could create the interior structures predicted from the planets' magnetic fields.

    • Ricky Chau
    • , Sebastien Hamel
    •  & William J. Nellis

  • Article |

    The interiors of outer solar planets are believed to contain water–methane mixtures that are subject to extreme pressures. Lee and Scandolo use molecular dynamics simulations to show that at high pressures there can be enhanced mixing and ionization, with consequences for the origin of the planetary magnetic field.

    • Mal-Soon Lee
    •  & Sandro Scandolo

  • Article |

    The physics governing the propagation of solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs), an important cause of bad space weather on Earth, is poorly understood. The authors model a CME's three-dimensional propagation and determine accurate arrival times near the Earth's surface.

    • Jason P. Byrne
    • , Shane A. Maloney
    •  & Peter T. Gallagher

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