The recent formation of Saturn's moonlets from viscous spreading of the main rings

Sébastien Charnoz (), Julien Salmon and Aurélien Crida
Additional contact information
Sébastien Charnoz: Laboratoire AIM, Université Paris Diderot/CEA/CNRS
Julien Salmon: Laboratoire AIM, Université Paris Diderot/CEA/CNRS
Aurélien Crida: University of Cambridge

Nature, 2010, vol. 465, issue 7299, 752-754

Abstract: Ring-derived moons A population of Saturn's smaller moons contrasts dramatically with the regular moons of the giant planets. Moons like Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa orbit in the equatorial plane of their host planet and are thought to have finished their accretion at about the same time as the planets, 4.5 billion years ago. Saturn's icy moonlets are much younger, formed less than 10 million years ago, and as their spectra resemble those of the main rings it has been suggested that they formed by accretion at the rings' edges. A new hybrid numerical simulation of the Saturn system supports this idea, suggesting that the moons formed via viscous spreading of Saturn's main rings beyond the Roche limit (the distance beyond which rings are gravitationally unstable, about 140,000 km from Saturn). After the moons' formation, the edge of the ring migrated inward.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09096 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:465:y:2010:i:7299:d:10.1038_nature09096

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature09096

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().