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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
"The apparent geological youth of Saturn’s rings is an open question since the days of Voyager. Two models have been suggested: i) the rings are primordial and their masses are comparable to the mass of Mimas; and ii) the Saturnian rings are young. In the former, it is somewhat difficult to account for the low observed level of non-icy “pollution” and the substantial observed colour variations within the rings given the deposition of meteoroid mass and ballistic transport mixing of micrometeoroid impact ejecta over these long time scales.While observations gathered during Cassini’s final orbits are being used to remove remaining uncertainties, all recent studies continue to support a ring age on the order of 10^8 years, far less than what current “primordial” origin scenarios for the rings predict. Alternatively, if the rings are young, the low current flux of heliocentric objects is large enough to either destroy a resident Mimas-mass moon, or to themselves become a ring parent by tidal disruption. At the moment, the hypothesis of a recent origin of the Saturn mid-sized satellites and its rings is under close scrutiny. Central to this discussion are the collisions between mid-sized objects (M~10^19 - 10^21 kg) resulting from the destabilisation of a previous mid-sized moon system which could potentially provide a pathway to the formation of rings and re-accreted moons 100 Myr ago.We hypothesise that the Saturn’s rings system is young and perform a suite of hydrodynamical simulations which model a Dione- and Rhea-like icy moons to demonstrate so. This suite spans the parameter space defined by 1) impact angle; 2) velocity at infinity; 3) number of particles within the simulation box. In this abstract we will present the collisional outcomes of our search for icy debris disk (i.e. rings) within the Roche limit of the planet. In this work we will use the open-source hydrodynamics and gravity code SWIFT (SPHWith Inter-dependent Fine-grained Tasking). SWIFT has been designed from scratch to run fast simulations and scales well on shared/distributed-memory architectures.Finally, we will briefly present some supplementary results focused on some other planetary Solar System conundrums."
Host: Jeremy Lilly