Tuesday, February 19, 2013

1302.4097 (Nikolai Brilliantov et al.)

An Aggregate Model for the Particle Size Distribution in Saturn's Rings    [PDF]

Nikolai Brilliantov, Pavel Krapivsky, Hisao Hayakawa, Anna Bodrova, Frank Spahn, Juergen Schmidt
Saturn's rings are known to consist of a large number of water ice particles. They form a flat disk, as the result of an interplay of angular momentum conservation and the steady loss of energy in dissipative particle collisions. For particles in the size range from a few centimeters to about a few meters a power law distribution of radii r^(-q), with q = 3, is implied by the light scattering properties of the rings. In contrast, for larger sizes the distribution drops steeply with increasing r. It has been suggested that this size distribution may arise from a balance between aggregation and fragmentation of ring particles, but to date neither the power-law dependence, nor the upper size-cutoff have been explained or quantified within a unique theory. Here we present a new kinetic model for the collisional evolution of the size distribution and show that the exponent q is expected to be constrained to the interval 2.75 < q < 3.5. An exponential cutoff towards larger particle sizes establishes naturally, the cutoff-radius being set by the relative frequency of aggregating and disruptive collisions. This cutoff is much smaller than the typical scale of micro-structure seen in Saturn's rings (100 m for self-gravity wakes) and our theory represents values averaged over these structures.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4097

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