Simulation of evolutionary mechanism of planetary rings

✍ Scribed by Hongnan Zhou

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 261 KB
• Volume: 46
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-0794
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00117192

✦ Synopsis

We devised a numerical model of planetary ring in which the inelastic collision and the gravitation between ring particles are considered. We adopt Hill's equations and the differential algorithm of circular mesh for computation of the particle orbits. The evolutional processes are presented for different coefficient of restitution E and dynamical optical depth ~'. The results show that the semi-major axis and eccentricity of the ring particles are changed with E and ~-. We compute the average energies transferred and loss in inelastic collisions for various values of the parameters. The dynamical equilibrium properties are discussed in the different cases.