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In astronomy or planetary science, the frost line, also known as the snow line or ice line, is the minimum distance from the central protostar of a solar nebula where the temperature is low enough for volatile compounds such as water, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to condense into solid grains, which will allow their accretion into planetesimals.
The climatic snow line is the boundary between a snow-covered and snow-free surface. The actual snow line may adjust seasonally, and be either significantly higher in elevation, or lower. The permanent snow line is the level above which snow will lie all year.
Dust astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that uses the information contained in individual cosmic dust particles ranging from their dynamical state to its isotopic, elemental, molecular, and mineralogical composition in order to obtain information on the astronomical objects occurring in outer space.
This glossary of astronomy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to astronomy and cosmology, their sub-disciplines, and related fields. Astronomy is concerned with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth. The field of astronomy features an extensive vocabulary and a ...
Chiron, a moon of Saturn supposedly sighted by Hermann Goldschmidt in 1861 but never observed by anyone else.; Chrysalis, a hypothetical moon of Saturn, named in 2022 by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using data from the Cassini–Huygens mission, thought to have been torn apart by Saturn's tidal forces, somewhere between 200 and 100 million years ago, with up to 99% ...
Microlensing planet searches are especially sensitive to low-mass exoplanets and those in fairly wide orbits (many astronomical units, beyond the snow-line), and are also the only way of detecting "orphan planets" ejected from their parent systems; so microlensing planet searches are complementary to the better-known radial velocity and transit ...
The narrow bands also mean some areas can get buried in snow, while little to no snow may fall just a few miles away. "Additionally at the ground surface, a body of water has less friction than ...
Also visible are parts of the 22° halo (the arcs passing through each sun dog), a sun pillar (the vertical line), and the parhelic circle (the horizontal line). A sun dog (or sundog ) or mock sun , also called a parhelion [ 1 ] (plural parhelia ) in atmospheric science , is an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to ...