Julien Salmon

Did Saturn's rings form during the Late Heavy Bombardment?

Abstract The origin of Saturns 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 attempt to quantify the cometary flux during the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) to assess the likelihood of both scenarios. Our analysis relies on the so-called “Nice model” of the origin of the LHB [Tsiganis, K., Gomes, R., Morbidelli, A., Levison, H.F., 2005. Nature 435, 459–461; Morbidelli, A., Levison, H.H., Tsiganis, K., Gomes, R., 2005. Nature 435, 462–465; Gomes, R., Levison, H.F., Tsiganis, K., Morbidelli, A., 2005. Nature 435, 466–469] and on the size distribution of the primordial trans-neptunian planetesimals constrained in [Charnoz, S., Morbidelli, A., 2007. Icarus 188, 468–480]. We find that the cometary flux on Saturn during the LHB was so high that both scenarios for the formation of Saturn rings are viable in principle. However, a more detailed study shows that the comet tidal disruption scenario implies that all four giant planets should have comparable ring systems whereas the destroyed satellite scenario would work only for Saturn, and perhaps Jupiter. This is because in Saturns system, the synchronous orbit is interior to the Roche Limit, which is a necessary condition for maintaining a satellite in the Roche Zone up to the time of the LHB. We also discuss the apparent elimination of silicates from the ring parent body implied by the purity of the ice in Saturns rings. The LHB has also strong implications for the survival of the saturnian satellites: all satellites smaller than Mimas would have been destroyed during the LHB, whereas Enceladus would have had from 40% to 70% chance of survival depending on the disruption model. In conclusion, these results suggest that the LHB is the “sweet moment” for the formation of a massive ring system around Saturn.

Long-term and large-scale viscous evolution of dense planetary rings

Abstract Planetary rings are common in the outer Solar System but their origin and long-term evolution is still a matter of debate. It is well known that viscous spreading is a major evolutionary process for rings, as it globally redistributes the disk’s mass and angular momentum, and can lead to the disk’s loosing mass by infall onto the planet or through the Roche limit. However, describing this process is highly dependent on the model used for the viscosity. In this paper we investigate the global and long-term viscous evolution of a circumplanetary disk. We have developed a simple 1D numerical code, but we use a physically realistic viscosity model derived from N-body simulations ( Daisaka et al., 2001 ), and dependent on the disk’s local properties (surface mass density, particle size, distance to the planet). Particularly, we include the effects of gravitational instabilities (wakes) that importantly enhance the disk’s viscosity. This method allows to study the global evolution of the disk over the age of the Solar System. Common estimates of the disk’s spreading time-scales with constant viscosity significantly underestimate the rings’ lifetime. We show that, with a realistic viscosity model, an initially narrow ring undergoes two successive evolutionary stages: (1) a transient rapid spreading when the disk is self-gravitating, with the formation of a density peak inward and an outer region marginally gravitationally stable, and with an emptying time-scale proportional to 1 / M 0 2 (where M0 is the disk’s initial mass), (2) an asymptotic regime where the spreading rate continuously slows down as larger parts of the disk become non-self-gravitating due to the decrease of the surface density, until the disk becomes completely non-self-gravitating. At this point its evolution dramatically slows down, with an emptying time-scale proportional to 1/M0, which significantly increases the disk’s lifetime compared to the case with constant viscosity. We show also that the disk’s width scales like t1/4 with the realistic viscosity model, while it scales like t1/2 in the case of constant viscosity, resulting in much larger evolutionary time-scales in our model. We find however that the present shape of Saturn’s rings looks like a 100 million-years old disk in our simulations. Concerning Jupiter’s, Uranus’ and Neptune’s rings that are faint today, it is not likely that they were much more massive in the past and lost most of their mass due to viscous spreading alone.