ASTRON 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Roche Limit, Shepherd Moons, Volcanism
18 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
There is a distance from any large object (the roche limit), where the tides of the big object are stronger than the gravity of smaller objects in orbit. Inside this distance small objects are torn apart. A very complicated system, composed of thousands of ringlets. There are bright and dark rings, gaps , and divisions. Saturn: bright rings because they are made of mostly water ice. Uranus and neptune: dark rings from organic material (darker than coal). Jupiter: not as dark as the ice giants, nor as bright as saturn"s: most likely composed of dark silicates. Volcanism on moons can also contribute ring material. Pairs of shepherd moons focus material into narrow rings. Triton orbits backwards so its orbit is decaying. Chapter 9: small bodies in the solar system. Pluto and ceres are dwarf planets because they fail #2. Most dwarf planets beyond neptune: plutoids, trans-neptunian objects, kuiper belt objects.
