Chaos at Uranus Spreads Dust Across the Regular Satellites
Abstract
The short collision timescales between the Uranian irregular satellites argue for the past generation of vast quantities of dust at the outer reaches of Uranus’ Hill sphere (Bottke et al. 2010). Uranus’ extreme obliquity (98 degrees) renders the orbits of large objects unstable to eccentricity perturbations in the radial range a ≈ 60 - 75 Rp. (Tremaine et al. 2009). We study the effect on dust by investigating how the instability is modified by radiation pressure. We find that dust particles generated at the orbits of the irregular satellites move inward as radiation forces cause their orbits to decay (Burns et al. 1979). When they reach the unstable region, grain orbits undergo chaotic large-amplitude eccentricity oscillations that bring their pericenters inside the orbits of the regular satellites. We argue that the impact probabilities and expected spatial distribution across the satellite surfaces might explain the observed hemispherical color asymmetries common to the outer four regular satellites.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division of Dynamical Astronomy Meeting #43
- Pub Date:
- May 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012DDA....43.0403T