Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) scientists are studying the Titan of the Moon of Saturn to evaluate their tidal dissipation rate, the lost energy as he orbits the planet ringed with his mass gravitational force. Understanding the dissipation of tides helps scientists to infer many other things about Titan, such as the composition of their internal nucleus and orbital history.
“When most people think of the tides, they think of the movement of the oceans, inside and outside, with the passage of the moon on top, said Dr. Brynna Downey.” But that is just because water moves more freely than anything else. When the moon passes over, the rock is also responding, less perceptively. But that little serious that the moon is imposing is what we call tide dissipation. Scientific advances.
To measure the dissipation of tides on the moon, scientists shoot lasers from the earth in the mirrors placed through their surface. This allows them to accurately measure the slightest movement. As this cannot be done in Titan, scientists have developed a way of inferring dissipation rates based on the difference in the rotation of the Titan spin axis of what would be expected in the absence of such force.
“The dissipation of tide in satellites affects its orbital and rotational evolution and their ability to maintain subsurface oceans,” says Downey. “Now that we have an estimate of the strength of the tides in Titan, what does it tell us about how fast the orbit is changing? What we discover is that it is changing very quickly in a geological time scale.”
Downey and her co -author, Dr. Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, considered that the angle of the orientation of the Titan rotating pole can only be due to friction and deduced a way of relating this angle with a friction parameter tidal. In this way, they were able to deduce part of the Titan story of their current state. With future space missions planned for several moons such as Europe and Ganymede, two Jupiter moons, Downey hopes that this method can also be applied to other moons.
Friction inside a satellite makes it slowly progress towards a circular orbit. To the rhythm that its orbit is changing, Titan should have acquired a circular orbit in approximately 350 million years. The fact that Titan currently has a non -circular or eccentric orbit implies that something happened in the last 350 million years that disturbed their orbit.
“Any number of things, such as an impact or loss of an ancient satellite, could have affected the orbit and have eccentric; our findings are agnostic in terms of the nature of the event, and others have proposed several options,” Downey said. “The conclusion is that we believe that something has disturbed the orbit of Titan in the last 350 million years, which is relatively recent in the history of the Solar System. We are seeing a snapshot over time between that event and the point where reaches a circular orbit again “
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