Related papers: Three-Dimensional Dynamics of Narrow Planetary Rin…
With $n$-body simulations we investigate the stability of tilted circumbinary planetary systems consisting of two nonzero mass planets. The planets are initially in circular orbits that are coplanar to each other, as would be expected if…
Dense and narrow rings have been discovered recently around the small Centaur object Chariklo and the dwarf planet Haumea, while being suspected around the Centaur Chiron. They are the first rings observed in the Solar System elsewhere than…
Saturn's magnetic field is remarkably axisymmetric. Its dipole axis is inclined by less than 0.2 deg with respect to its rotation axis. Rotationally driven convection of magnetospheric plasma breaks the axisymmetry of its external magnetic…
Applying the technique of dynamical maps we study the orbital stability of test particles in the Solar System in the space (a,e,i) defined by 0.1<a<38 au, 0<e<0.9 and 0<i<180 identifying the unstable and stable regions. We find stable…
Planetary rings are ubiquitous structure in our Solar System, but their formation mechanisms remain under debate. One of the proposed scenarios is the tidal disruption of a nearby passing body that enters within a planet's Roche limit,…
This study is motivated by the observation, based on photographs from the Cassini mission, that Saturn's rings have a fractal structure in radial direction. Accordingly, two questions are considered: (1) What Newtonian mechanics argument in…
Planetary rings are the only nearby astrophysical disks, and the only disks that have been investigated by spacecraft. Although there are significant differences between rings and other disks, chiefly the large planet/ring mass ratio that…
Exoplanetary systems hosting multiple low-mass planets are thought to have experienced dynamical instability, during which planet-planet collisions and mergers occur; these collisions can impart substantial amount of angular momentum to the…
In a previous work (Pichardo et al. 2005), we studied stable configurations for circumstellar discs in eccentric binary systems. We searched for "invariant loops": closed curves (analogous to stable periodic orbits in time-independent…
Images obtained by the Cassini spacecraft of the region just beyond Saturn's main rings reveal a previously unreported narrow and dusty ringlet that has dynamical connections with both Saturn's small satellite Prometheus and the F ring. The…
Seismology of the gas giants holds the potential to resolve long-standing questions about their internal structure and rotation state. We construct a family of Saturn interior models constrained by the gravity field and compute their…
Planets in the habitable zone of lower-mass stars are often assumed to be in a state of tidally synchronized rotation, which would considerably affect their putative habitability. Although thermal tides cause Venus to rotate retrogradely,…
The thermal inertia values of Saturn's main rings (the A, B, and C rings and the Cassini division) are derived by applying our thermal model to azimuthally scanned spectra taken by the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). Model…
In this paper, we introduce a simplified model to understand the location of Saturn's F ring. The model is a planar restricted five-body problem defined by the gravitational field of Saturn, including its second zonal harmonic $J_2$, the…
Recent asteroseismic measurements have revealed a small population of stars in close binaries, containing primaries with extremely slow rotation rates. Such stars defy the standard expectation of tidal synchronization in such systems, but…
Tidal dissipation inside giant planets is important for the orbital evolution of their natural satellites. It is conventionally treated by parameterized equilibrium tidal theory, in which the tidal torque declines rapidly with distance, and…
We numerically investigate the dynamics of orbits in 3D circumbinary phase-space as a function of binary eccentricity and mass fraction. We find that inclined circumbinary orbits in the elliptically-restricted three-body problem display a…
We investigated the millennial-scale evolution of narrow innermost rings composed of pebble-sized to sub-millimeter particles around the four known ring-bearing small bodies Chiron, Chariklo, Quaoar, and Haumea. Using a GPU-accelerated…
We address the occurrence of narrow planetary rings under the interaction with shepherds. Our approach is based on a Hamiltonian framework of non-interacting particles where open motion (escape) takes place, and includes the quasi-periodic…
Nuclear rings at centers of barred galaxies exhibit strong star formation activities. They are thought to undergo gravitational instability when sufficiently massive. We approximate them as rigidly-rotating isothermal objects and…