|
| | | | |
| | | |
| Stat |
Members: 3645
Articles: 2'506'133
Articles rated: 2609
26 April 2024 |
|
| | | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
|
Did Saturn's rings form during the Late Heavy Bombardment ? | | Sebastien Charnoz
; Alessandro Morbidelli
; Luke H. Dones
; Julien Salmon
; | | Date: |
29 Sep 2008 | | Abstract: | The origin of Saturn’ s massive ring system is still unknown. Two popular
scenarios - the tidal splitting of passing comets and the collisional
destruction of a satellite - rely on a high cometary flux in the past. In the
present paper we attempt to quantify the cometary flux during the Late Heavy
Bombardment (LHB) to assess the likelihood of both scenarios. Our analysis
relies on the so-called Nice model of the origin of the LHB (Tsiganis et al.,
2005; Morbidelli et al., 2005; Gomes et al., 2005) and on the size distribution
of the primordial trans-Neptunian planetesimals constrained in Charnoz &
Morbidelli (2007). We find that the cometary flux on Saturn during the LHB was
so high that both scenarios for the formation of Saturn rings are viable in
principle. However, a more detailed study shows that the comet tidal disruption
scenario implies that all four giant planets should have comparable ring
systems whereas the destroyed satellite scenario would work only for Saturn,
and perhaps Jupiter. This is because in Saturn’s system, the synchronous orbit
is interior to the Roche Limit, which is a necessary condition for maintaining
a satellite in the Roche zone up to the time of the LHB. We also discuss the
apparent elimination of silicates from the ring parent body implied by the
purity of the ice in Saturn ’ s rings. The LHB has also strong implications
for the survival of the Saturnian satellites: all satellites smaller than Mimas
would have been destroyed during the LHB, whereas Enceladus would have had from
40% to 70% chance of survival depending on the disruption model. In conclusion,
these results suggest that the LHB is the sweet moment for the formation of a
massive ring system around Saturn. | | Source: | arXiv, 0809.5073 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
browser Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
|
| |
|
|
|
|
News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:
| |
REGISTER