Other
Scientific paper
Sep 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.5612p&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #56.12; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.587
Other
Scientific paper
Titan is too massive to be a native moon of Saturn. It was captured from solar orbit (Prentice 2004 Earth Moon Planets 30 209; http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0602512). Rhea and the other mid-sized Saturnian moons have masses that are consistent with the values expected for condensation within a family of gas rings that were shed by the proto-Saturnian cloud during its gravitational contraction from an initial size 30RSat (Prentice 2006 PASA 23 1). Here RSat = 60268 km. Titan destroyed 2 Rhea-sized native moons that existed at orbital radii 17RSat and 24RSat. Much of those moons, which contain 24% by mass of NH3 ice and 5.7% of CH4 as clathrate hydrate, are now buried in Titan's mantle. This is the source of Titan's atmosphere. Maybe Xanadu is the burial site of one such moon.
Titan condensed in a gas ring that was shed by the proto-solar cloud at Saturn's orbit. The temperature T is 94 K and the mean orbit gas pressure p is 0.049 Pa. The condensate contains rock (mass fraction 0.492, mean density 3.667 g/cm3), graphite (0.034) and water ice (0.474). A 2-zone satellite model based on this mix has mean core temperature Tcore = 600 K and average density ρav = 1.94 g/cm3. Increasing the ice fraction to 0.506 yields ρav = 1.881 g/cm3 and axial moment-of-inertia coefficient C/MR2 = 0.317.
Enceladus formed at orbital radius 3.25RSat where T = 300 K, p = 2.45 Mpa and H2O condenses as LIQUID. Initially the satellite had a liquid water mantle surrounding a hydrated rocky core of mean density 3.120 g/cm3 and mass fraction Xcore = 0.574. Increasing Xcore to 0.595 yields a present frozen moon whose ρav = 1.606 g/cm3 and C/MR2 = 0.308. Perhaps Saturn's rings arise from collisions between the thick pure ice mantles of the small innermost moons.
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