Loss of a satellite could explain Saturn’s obliquity and young rings
Name
saturn_paper_revised3.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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998.28 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Wisdom, Jack
Dbouk, Rola
Militzer, Burkhard
Hubbard, William B
Nimmo, Francis
Downey, Brynna G
French, Richard G
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Wisdom, Jack, Dbouk, Rola, Militzer, Burkhard, Hubbard, William B, Nimmo, Francis et al. 2022. "Loss of a satellite could explain Saturn’s obliquity and young rings." Science, 377 (6612).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The origin of Saturn’s ~26.7° obliquity and ~100-million-year-old rings is unknown. The observed rapid outward migration of Saturn’s largest satellite, Titan, could have raised Saturn’s obliquity through a spin-orbit precession resonance with Neptune. We use Cassini data to refine estimates of Saturn’s moment of inertia, finding that it is just outside the range required for the resonance. We propose that Saturn previously had an additional satellite, which we name Chrysalis, that caused Saturn’s obliquity to increase through the Neptune resonance. Destabilization of Chrysalis’s orbit ~100 million years ago can then explain the proximity of the system to the resonance and the formation of the rings through a grazing encounter with Saturn.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.ABN1234
