Accretion, Early Thermal State and Differentiation of Icy Satellites

Details Accretion, Early Thermal State and Differentiation of Icy Satellites Accretion, Early Thermal State and Differentiation of Icy Satellites

Oct 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011epsc.conf..440m&link_type=abstract

EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011, held 2-7 October 2011 in Nantes, France. http://meetings.copernicus.org/epsc-dps2011, p.440

Physics

Scientific paper

For a better understanding of the thermal evolution of a growing icy satellite and of the conditions under which melting may occur, we developed a three-dimensional numerical model based on the Oedipus code, initially developed to solve the equations of thermal convection in a spherical geometry [11]. This numerical model characterizes the thermal evolution of an icy satellite during its accretion from a variety of plausible impactor population. For each impact, we consider the thermal effects due to the dissipation of the impactor's kinetic energy: After an impact, temperature locally increases deep in the impacted growing object and within the shallow ejecta blanket. As the icy moon grows, gravitational forces increase and impacts become more and more energetic. As the temperature increases below the impact site is proportional to the impact velocity, melting events areexpected tooccur at the end of the accretion once the icy moon reaches a critical size. In order to constrain this critical size, we simulate the growth and thermal evolution of icy bodies from a kilometer-size initial undifferentiated body to a size of order 2500 km from various populations of undifferentiated icy impactors and by assuming different orbital configurations for the growing body and different accretion rates. Preliminary results will be presented.

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