Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.1907s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #19.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.981
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The migration of a secondary body embedded in a disk orbiting around a massive central body is a well-known problem in the study of protoplanetary disks. Depending on the secondary's properties, and the disk's surface density, the object will migrate differently (the so-called type I, II and III migration). In Saturn's rings, the Encke and Keeler gaps shelter Pan and Daphnis. Although the formation of Saturn's small satellites has been recently suggested to be the product of ring material accretion through the Roche limit (Charnoz et al. 2010), the origin of these very small bodies ( 30km for Pan and 9km for Daphnis) embedded in the rings is yet to be explained.
The torque exerted by the rings onto these moonlets should cause them to migrate. The direction of the migration should however be very dependent on the disk's surface density profile around the satellite, and also on the large scale structure of the disk. Determining how Pan and Daphnis migrate in the rings is an important question, as it might give us clues on the local density profile but also on the large-scale viscous evolution of the A ring, that may depend critically on the possible confinement of its inner edge, which is still a matter of debate.
We use a 1D numerical code including the disk's viscous evolution, with a realistic viscosity model including the effects of the disk's self-gravity, and resonant interactions between the disk and the satellites at Lindblad resonances. As expected, after a short transition regime the moonlet starts to migrate with its division, somewhat similarly to a type-II migration. The migration rate depends on the A ring density but is sensitive also to the confinement state of the A ring inner edge. The magnitude and the detectability of this migration will be quantified.
Charnoz Sebastien
Salmon Julien
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