Simulations of Saturn's Rings Evolution Over 5 Billion Years with Variable Viscosity & Satellite Interactions

Details Simulations of Saturn's Rings Evolution Over 5 Billion Years with Variable Viscosity & Satellite Interactions Simulations of Saturn's Rings Evolution Over 5 Billion Years with Variable Viscosity & Satellite Interactions

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.2508s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #25.08

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Scientific paper

Saturn's rings are one of the various examples of discs that can be found in the universe (protoplanetary discs, accretion discs, ...) They have their own specificities but they globally evolve through physical processes which are not very different from those occurring in other discs, e.g. viscous spreading and resonant interactions with secondary objects. While significant progress has been made recently on understanding the rings of Saturn, the question of their age is still uncertain.
The viscous spreading transports material toward the edges of the rings, resulting in mass being lost either on the planet or through the Roche limit. Constraining the timescales for this physical process is thus fundamental to determine the age of Saturn's rings.
To understand the global evolution of Saturn's rings over 5 billion years, we use a 1-dimensional hydrodynamic code including viscous spreading, and satellites torques. Common estimates for the viscous age of the rings using constant and/or uniform viscosity conclude to a lifetime of the rings of a few hundred million years (Esposito 1986, Griv & Gedalin 2006). We show in our work that new viscosity prescriptions derived from N-body simulations such as the one of Daisaka et al. 2001 would dramatically affect the large scale evolution of the ring system, allowing for a survival of the rings over 5 billion years.
We show also that transitions form self-gravitating to non self-gravitating regions would affect the shape of the rings, particularly in the formation of sharp edges. Surprisingly the final state of the ring system seems somewhat independent of the initial mass using the viscosity of Daisaka et al. 2001. The possibility of confinement by nearby satellites is still under investigation but first results suggest that they could significantly lengthen the rings viscous age.

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