Vertical Splashing and Strong Damping of Spiral Density Waves in Planetary Rings

Details Vertical Splashing and Strong Damping of Spiral Density Waves in Planetary Rings Vertical Splashing and Strong Damping of Spiral Density Waves in Planetary Rings

Jul 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dda....38.1202s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #38, #12.02

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Published models of spiral density waves in planetary rings have generally ignored the vertical motion of particles out of the plane of the rings. N-body simulations of nonlinear waves in rings tend to exhibit vertical splashing of ring particles associated with strong density enhancements in the vicinity of the wave peaks. This vertical splashing is often associated with abrupt changes in the particles' semi-major axes, implying rapid local transport of angular momentum above and beyond the transport carried by the self-gravity of the wave. Since particles collide inelastically as the particles fall back to the ring midplane, vertical splashing also provides a new mechanism for the damping of strongly nonlinear density waves. We describe a new model of density waves that explicitly describes the kinetic energy of the vertical splashing as well as the associated angular momentum transport. The model contains an adjustable parameter that can be constrained by fitting to the results of N-body simulations of spiral density waves in rings as well as the many density wave profiles that are found in the Cassini UVIS stellar occultation profiles.

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