Caroline Haslebacher | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Active moons in our Solar System and beyond -- Io, Europa, Enceladus, Triton, and exomoons

The outgassing signatures of Io, Europa, Enceladus, Triton, and Io-like exomoons are the focus of this review chapter. The rocky volcanic world of Io is unique in our Solar System, with plumes reaching to hundreds of kilometres in altitude. Io-like exomoons could leave signatures strong enough to be detected with ground-based telescopes. The icy moons Europa and Enceladus, with their subsurface oceans, are currently the best candidates for life. Triton is different in many ways and raises unexplored questions. Our knowledge of these active moons is derived from space- and ground-based observations. To understand their origin, we discuss moon formation in general, before examining evidence and signatures of plumes on these moons. Given the accessibility of subsurface oceanic material through the occurrence of plumes, we expand on possibilities to investigate biosignatures.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2025

Nonparametric Smoothing of Directional and Axial Data

We discuss generalized linear models for directional data where the conditional distribution of the response is a von Mises-Fisher distribution in arbitrary dimension or a Bingham distribution on the unit circle. To do this properly, we parametrize von Mises-Fisher distributions by Euclidean parameters and investigate computational aspects of this parametrization. Then we modify this approach for local polynomial regression as a means of nonparametric smoothing of distributional data. The methods are illustrated with simulated data and a data set from planetary sciences involving covariate vectors on a sphere with axial response.

stat.ME↗