English

Rotation of a synchronous viscoelastic shell

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2018-01-24 v1

Abstract

Several natural satellites of the giant planets have shown evidence of a global internal ocean, coated by a thin, icy crust. This crust is probably viscoelastic, which would alter its rotational response. This response would translate into several rotational quantities, i.e. the obliquity, and the librations at different frequencies, for which the crustal elasticity reacts differently. This study aims at modelling the global response of the viscoelastic crust. For that, I derive the time-dependency of the tensor of inertia, which I combine with the time evolution of the rotational quantities, thanks to an iterative algorithm. This algorithm combines numerical simulations of the rotation with a digital filtering of the resulting tensor of inertia. The algorithm works very well in the elastic case, provided the problem is not resonant. However, considering tidal dissipation adds different phase lags to the oscillating contributions, which challenge the convergence of the algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.10913,
  title  = {Rotation of a synchronous viscoelastic shell},
  author = {Benoît Noyelles},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.10913},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society