Chaotic dust orbits at Uranus may explain hemispherical color asymmetries on its regular satellites

Details Chaotic dust orbits at Uranus may explain hemispherical color asymmetries on its regular satellites Chaotic dust orbits at Uranus may explain hemispherical color asymmetries on its regular satellites

Oct 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011epsc.conf...47t&link_type=abstract

EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011, held 2-7 October 2011 in Nantes, France. http://meetings.copernicus.org/epsc-dps2011, p.47

Physics

Scientific paper

When [1] noticed that Uranus' four largest moons had leading-trailing hemispherical color asymmetries, they conjectured that infalling dust from yet-to-be discovered, retrograde irregular satellites might be responsible. Eight such retrograde moons have since been found, and the recent detection of Phoebe's ring at Saturn [6] suggests that large dust rings generated by irregular satellites might be common around the giant planets. We therefore investigate whether infalling dust in the Uranian system might explain the color dichotomies among its regular satellites. In particular, we aim to understand why dust seems to have been distributed among them all rather than concentrated almost exclusively on the outermost moon, Oberon, as in the Saturnian case of Iapetus. When studying the orbits of evolving dust grains, we find that Uranus' unique, extreme obliquity ( 98°) results in chaotic, large-amplitude variations in orbital eccentricity and inclination due to the wide misalignment between perturbations from the planet's oblateness and tidal perturbations from the Sun. These rapid orbital variations allow dust to access all the regular satellites simultaneously (rather than in sequence fromoutermost inward). This can explain the fact that all four moons exhibit leading-trailing hemispherical color asymmetries.

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