arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 · 2018-10-11

Aerodynamics of flying saucers

Hosted on danix · open direct · source page

We identify various structures on the configuration space C of a flying saucer, moving in a three-dimensional smooth manifold M. Always C is a five-dimensional contact manifold. If M has a projective structure, then C is its twistor space and is equipped with an almost contact Legendrean structure. Instead, if M has a conformal structure, then the saucer moves according to a CR structure on C. With yet another structure on M, the contact distribution in C is equipped with a cone over a twisted cubic. This defines a certain type of Cartan geometry on C (more specifically, a type of `parabolic geometry') and we provide examples when this geometry is `flat,' meaning that its symmetries comprise the split form of the exceptional Lie algebra G2.

Tags

craft: Disc / Saucer

evidence: Document

source: Academic

Metadata (17)

Source	arxiv
Source tier	2 (archive / academic)
Credibility	tier 4 / 5
Kind	document
MIME	application/pdf
Size	0.27 MB
Author	Michael Eastwood, Pawel Nurowski
Published	2018-10-11
Language	en
Content hash	82fe2f76e47a1042…
First seen	2026-05-10 08:52
Last seen	2026-05-10 23:35
Source URL	http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04855v1
Direct URL	https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04855v1
Mirror URL	/file/01KR8HDTQBJZSNN2ZAVSGYM89F.pdf
· query	all:"flying saucer"
· pdf	https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04855v1

Permalink: /item/01KR8HDTQBJZSNN2ZAVSGYM89F.html

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 51

The Flying Saucer edge-on disc's Near Infrared silhouette revealed by the JWST JEDIce program

Edge-on discs offer a unique opportunity to probe radial and vertical dust and gas distributions in the protoplanetary phase. This study aims to investigate the distribution of micron-sized dust particles in the Flying Saucer (BKLT J162813…

2025-12-15

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 49

Edge-On Disk Study (EODS) III: Molecular Stratification in the Flying Saucer Disk

Context: Investigating the vertical distribution of molecular content in protoplanetary disks remains difficult in most disks mildly inclined along the line of sight. In contrast, edge-on disks provide a direct (tomographic) view of the 2D…

2025-09-30

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 47

Edge-On Disk Study (EODS) II: Thermal Structure of the Flying Saucer Disk

Context. The dust and gas temperature in proto-planetary disks play critical roles in determining their chemical evolution and influencing planet formation processes. Aims. We attempted an accurate measurement of the dust and CO temperatur…

2025-07-04

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 22

The Chemical Inventory of the Inner Regions of Planet-forming Disks -- The JWST/MINDS Program

The understanding of planet formation has changed recently, embracing the new idea of pebble accretion. This means that the influx of pebbles from the outer regions of planet-forming disks to their inner zones could determine the compositi…

2023-07-31

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 22

Spinors in Five-Dimensional Contact Geometry

We use classical (Penrose) two-component spinors to set up the differential geometry of two parabolic contact structures in five dimensions, namely $G_2$ contact geometry and Legendrean contact geometry. The key players in these two geomet…

2022-01-31

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 19

Tracing Molecular Stratification within an Edge-on Protoplanetary Disk

High-resolution observations of edge-on proto-planetary disks in emission from molecular species sampling different critical densities and formation pathways offer the opportunity to trace the vertical chemical and physical structures of p…

2020-12-18

arxiv · archive / academic cred 4 17

Aerobatics of flying saucers

Starting from the observation that a flying saucer is a nonholonomic mechanical system whose 5-dimensional configuration space is a contact manifold, we show how to enrich this space with a number of geometric structures by imposing furthe…

2018-10-11