Analysis of Ring Wake Simulations

Details Analysis of Ring Wake Simulations Analysis of Ring Wake Simulations

Sep 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999dda....31.0403l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #31, #04.03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

indent=20pt Collisional N-body simulations at the edge of a perturbed planetary ring are used to model the edges of the Encke gap in Saturn's rings. A small satellite, Pan, orbits inside the Encke gap and excites forced eccentricities and density wakes on both edges of the gap. The simulations use a local cell method to model a narrow ring using particles of the appropriate size for the A-ring at the proper optical depth. In the simulations we see evidence for shear reversal at the wake peaks. Our results imply that the most significant factor in the damping of the wakes is the reduction of the forced eccentricity and not randomization of the phase angles of the particles. The reduction of the forced eccentricity occurs in an orderly fashion with steep drops at each successive wake maximum following the highest density wake peak. indent=20pt At the inner edge (that nearer the perturber) we see phase shifts visible as bending of the line wake maxima. Because the simulations are actually of narrow rings, we also see a number of interesting phenomena at the outer edge. A strong boundary layer forms at that edge, which becomes partially detached from the rest of the ring. The wake patterns persist much further downstream in this boundary layer than they do in the rest of the ring. We also observe that in the less dense region between the main section of the ring and the boundary layer the magnitude of the forced eccentricities reverse their behavior in the main part and increase at each wake maxima. indent=20pt At the talk we will compare our results to the various analytic theories of Borderies, Goldreich, and Tremaine.

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