相关论文: Saturn's Interior After the Cassini Grand Finale
Certain regions of Saturn's rings exhibit periodic opacity variations with characteristic radial wavelengths of up to a few hundred meters that have been attributed to viscous overstabilities. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer…
A new symplectic N-body integrator is introduced, one designed to calculate the global 360 degree evolution of a self-gravitating planetary ring that is in orbit about an oblate planet. This freely-available code is called epi_int, and it…
Computed using the APPLE planetary evolution code, we present updated evolutionary models for Jupiter and Saturn that incorporate helium rain, non-adiabatic thermal structures, and "fuzzy" extended heavy-element cores. Building on our…
Anderson & Schubert (2007, Science,317,1384) proposed that Saturn's rotation period can be ascertained by minimizing the dynamic heights of the 100 mbar isosurface with respect to the geoid; they derived a rotation period of 10h 32m 35s. We…
In the last few years Cassini-VIMS, the Visible and Infared Mapping Spectrometer, returned to us a comprehensive view of the Saturn's icy satellites and rings. After having analyzed the satellites' spectral properties (Filacchione et al.…
Context: As a result of Titan's migration and Saturn's probable capture in secular spin-orbit resonance, recent works show that Saturn's obliquity could be steadily increasing today and may reach large values in the next billions of years.…
Spacecraft observations of Saturn's rings show evidence of an active aggregation-disaggregation process triggered by periodic influences from the nearby moons. This leads to clumping and break-up of the ring particles at time-scales of the…
Saturn possesses a dynamically rich system containing numerous moons and impressive rings. Whether the rings of Saturn are much younger than the planet itself has been a long-open question; more recently a young age has been proposed for…
Our knowledge of Saturns neutral thermosphere is far superior to that of the other giant planets due to Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) observations of 15 solar occultations and 26 stellar occultations analyzed to date.…
D68 is a narrow ringlet located only 67,627 km (1.12 planetary radii) from Saturn's spin axis. Images of this ringlet obtained by the Cassini spacecraft reveal that this ringlet exhibits persistent longitudinal brightness variations and a…
Tidal effects in planetary systems are the main driver in the orbital migration of natural satellites. They result from physical processes occurring deep inside celestial bodies, whose effects are rarely observable from surface imaging. For…
The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane. Giant planets are expected to form with near-zero obliquities. After its formation, some dynamical mechanism must therefore have tilted Saturn up to its…
The age of the rings and some of the moons of Saturn is an open question, and multiple lines of evidence point to a recent (few hundred Myr ago) cataclysm involving disruption of past moons. The main driver of the evolution of the Saturnian…
Phase separation between hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures leads to the rainout of helium in the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn. This process, also known as "helium rain", affects their long-term evolution.…
It is widely accepted that Titan and the mid-sized regular satellites around Saturn were formed in the circum-Saturn disk. Thus, if these mid-sized satellites were simply accreted by collisions of similar ice-rock satellitesimals in the…
The origin of Saturn\' s massive ring system is still unknown. Two popular scenarios - the tidal splitting of passing comets and the collisional destruction of a satellite - rely on a high cometary flux in the past. In the present paper we…
Saturn's inner B-ring and its C-ring support wavetrains of contrasting amplitudes but with similar length scales, 100-1000 km. In addition, the inner B-ring is punctuated by two intriguing `flat' regions between radii 93,000 km and 98,000…
The hypothesis of a recent origin of Saturn's rings and its mid-sized moons is actively debated. It was suggested that a proto-Rhea and a proto-Dione might have collided recently, giving birth to the modern system of mid-sized moons. It is…
We report the discovery of several large "propeller" moons in the outer part of Saturn's A ring, objects large enough to be followed over the 5-year duration of the Cassini mission. These are the first objects ever discovered that can be…
In this work, we model the radial density profile of the outer A ring of Saturn observed with Cassini cameras (Tiscareno & Harris 2018): An axisymmetric diffusion model has been developed, accounting for the outward viscous flow of the ring…