Packed Perturbers: Short-term Interactions Among Uranus’ Inner Moons

Details Packed Perturbers: Short-term Interactions Among Uranus’ Inner Moons Packed Perturbers: Short-term Interactions Among Uranus’ Inner Moons

May 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dda....41.0807d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #41, #8.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.933

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Packed within 2-3 radii of Urarnus are thirteen tiny moons. Because of their close spacing, these satellites exert strong mutual perturbations, an unstable configuration in many ways analogous to planetesimals packed in proto-planetary disks. With Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations, Showalter and Lissauer (2006) discovered significant orbital changes since Voyager 2 observed the system (Jacobson 1998), signatures of the instability revealed in long-term numerical integrations by Duncan and Lissauer (1997), which predicted collisions in 4-100 million years. Previously, we reported pairs of moons near first-order mean motion resonances -- Bianca and Cressida, (16:15), Cressida and Desdemona (47:46), Desdemona and Portia (13:12), Perdita and Belinda (44:43), Belinda and Cupid (58:57) -- and results of short timescale integrations demonstrating close coupling of the satellites’ orbital variations (Dawson, French, and Showalter, DDA Meeting #40, #6.04). To further probe the moons’ mutual perturbations and chaotic orbital changes, we integrate subsets of satellites using a range of assumed masses. To assess the variation of the orbital elements and behavior of resonant arguments, we transform integrated state vectors to geometric elements, which account for the oblateness of Uranus - significant for moons so close to Uranus - and avoid erroneous short-term oscillations induced by oblateness in the osculating elements (Renner and Sicardy 2006). We link librations of Cressida and Desdemona to orbital changes in neighboring satellites Bianca and Portia. We also find the system's behavior is very sensitive to assumed masses, allowing us to assess the consistency of masses estimated from photometrically volumes (Karkoschka 2001), uncertain by a factor of 2-3, with observed orbital changes. In future work, we will combine our analysis with astrometry from a high quality set of observations to better constrain the moons’ masses. See abstract by Showalter et al., this meeting. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Harvard University Astronomy Department.

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