Outer Rings and Chaotic Orbits in the Uranian System

Details Outer Rings and Chaotic Orbits in the Uranian System Outer Rings and Chaotic Orbits in the Uranian System

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dda....37.0701s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #37, #7.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.669

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Hubble observations of the Uranian system, spanning 2003 to the present, have revealed two small regular satellites and two faint, outer rings. The satellite Mab (U XXVI) is 12 km in radius and orbits 97,735 km from the center of Uranus, between the orbits of Puck and Miranda. It shows a significant, unexplained orbital libration; its mean longitude in 2004 fell 1° behind that in 2003 and 2005. Cupid (U XXVII) is 9 km in radius and orbits at 74,392 km, just 863 km interior to the orbit of Belinda. These moons are locked in 44:43 resonance. Most of the other inner moons Belinda through Portia show measurable orbital changes in the last 20 years, suggesting subtle, possibly chaotic interactions.
Both newly-discovered rings have been recovered from high-phase Voyager images, and photometry indicates that they are composed primarily of dust. Peak normal optical depths are 10-5. Ring R/2003 U 1 peaks at the orbit of Mab and is almost certainly produced by dust ejected from Mab's surface. It has a triangular profile with a full width of 20,000 km. R/2003 U 2 orbits at 67,300 km, and is bounded by the orbits of nearby Portia and Rosalind. No known moons fall within this region; we hypothesize that a belt of embedded, sub-km bodies serve as the unseen source of this dust. Recent Keck observations reveal that the inner ring is red but the outer ring is blue. Blue indicates that particle sizes are primarily sub-µm in size; the dynamical implications of this result are not currently understood.
Support for this publication was provided by NASA through proposals GO-9823, GO-10102, and GO-10274 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under NASA contract NAS5-26555.

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