Hello everybody! Today, I will tell you on the dynamics of the Alkyonides. You know the Alkyonides? No? OK… There are very small satellites of Saturn, i.e. kilometer-sized, which orbit pretty close to the rings, but outside. These very small bodies are known to us thanks to the Cassini spacecraft, and a recent study, which I present you today, has investigated their long-term evolution, in particular their stability. Are they doomed or not? How long can they survive? You will know this and more after reading this presentation of Long-term evolution and stability of Saturnian small satellites: Aegaeon, Methone, Anthe, and Pallene, by Marco Muñoz-Gutiérrez and Silvia Giuliatti Winter. This study has recently been accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Alkyonides

As usually in planetary sciences, bodies are named after the Greek mythology, which is the case of the four satellites discussed today. But I must admit that I cheat a little: I present them as Alkyonides, while Aegeon is actually a Hecatoncheires. The Alkyonides are the 7 daughters of Alcyoneus, among them are Anthe, Pallene, and Methone.

Here are some of there characteristics:

	Methone	Pallene	Anthe	Aegaeon
Semimajor axis	194,402 km	212,282 km	196,888 km	167,425 km
Eccentricity	0	0.004	0.0011	0.0002
Inclination	0.013°	0.001°	0.015°	0.001°
Diameter	2.9 km	4.4 km	2 km	0.66 km
Orbital period	24h14m	27h42m	24h52m	19h24m
Discovery	2004	2004	2007	2009

For comparison, Mimas orbits Saturn at 185,000 km, and the outer edge of the A Ring, i.e. of the main rings of Saturn, is at 137,000 km. So, we are in the close system of Saturn, but exterior to the rings.

These bodies are in mean-motion resonances with main satellites of Saturn, more specifically:

• Methone orbits near the 15:14 MMR with Mimas,
• Pallene is close to the 19:16 MMR with Enceladus,
• Anthe orbits near the 11:10 MMR with Mimas,
• Aegaeon is in the 7:6 MMR with Mimas.

As we will see, these resonances have a critical influence on the long-term stability.

Rings and arcs

Beside the main and well-known rings of Saturn, rings and arcs of dusty material orbit at other locations, but mostly in the inner system (with the exception of the Phoebe ring). In particular, the G Ring is a 9,000 km wide faint ring, which inner edge is at 166,000 km… Yep, you got it: Aegaeon is inside. Some even consider it is a G Ring object.

Methone and Anthe have dusty arcs associated with them. The difference between an arc and a ring is that an arc is longitudinally bounded, i.e. it is not extended enough to constitute a ring. The Methone arc extends over some 10°, against 20° for the Anthe arc. The material composing them is assumed to be ejecta from Methone and Anthe, respectively.

However, Pallene has a whole ring, constituted from ejecta as well.

Why sometimes a ring, and sometimes an arc? Well, it tell us something on the orbital stability of small particles in these areas. Imagine you are a particle: you are kicked from home, i.e. your satellite, but you remain close to it… for some time. Actually you drift slowly. While you drift, you are somehow shaken by the gravitational action of the other satellites, which disturb your Keplerian orbit around the planet. If you are shaken enough, then you may leave the system of Saturn. If you are not, then you can finally be anywhere on the orbit of your satellite, and since you are not the only one to have been ejected (you feel better, don’t you?), then you and your colleagues will constitute a whole ring. If you are lucky enough, you can end up on the satellite.

The longer the arc (a ring is a 360° arc), the more stable the region.

Frequency diffusion

The authors studied

1. the stability of the dusty particles over 18 years
2. the stability of the satellites in the system of Saturn over several hundreds of kilo-years (kyr).

For the stability of the particles, they computed the frequency diffusion index. It consists in:

1. Simulating the motion of the particles over 18 years,
2. Determining the main frequency of the dynamics over the first 9 years, and over the last 9 ones,
3. Comparing these two numbers. The smaller the difference, the more stable you are.

The numerical simulations is something I have addressed in previous posts: you use a numerical integrator to simulate the motion of the particle, in considering an oblate Saturn, the oblateness being mostly due to the rings, and several satellites. Our four guys, and Janus, Epimetheus, Mimas, Enceladus, and Tethys.

How resonances destabilize an orbit

When a planetary body is trapped in a mean-motion resonance, there is an angle, which is an integer combination of angles present in its dynamics and in the dynamics of the other body, which librates. An example is the MMR Aegaeon-Mimas, which causes the angle 7λ_Mimas-6λ_Aegaeon-ϖ_Mimas to librate. λ is the mean longitude, and ϖ is the longitude of the pericentre. Such a resonance is supposed to affect the dynamics of the two satellites but, given their huge mass ratio (Mimas is between 300 and 500 millions times heavier than Aegaeon), only Aegaeon is affected. The resonance is at a given location, and Aegaeon stays there.
But a given resonance has some width, and several resonant angles (we say arguments) are associated with a resonance ratio. As a consequence, several resonances may overlap, and in that case … my my my…
The small body is shaken between different locations, its eccentricity and / or inclination can be raised, until being dynamically unstable…
And in this particular region of the system of Saturn, there are many resonances, which means that the stability of the discovered body is not obvious. This is why the authors studied it.

Results

Stability of the dusty particles

The authors find that Pallene cannot clear its ring efficiently, despite its size. Actually, this zone is the most stable, wrt the dynamical environments of Anthe, Methone and Aegaeon. However, 25% of the particles constituting the G Ring should collide with Aegaeon in 18 years. This probably means that there is a mechanism, which refills the G Ring.

Stability of the satellites

From long-term numerical simulations over 400 kyr, i.e. more than one hundred millions of orbits, these 4 satellites are stable. For Pallene, the authors guarantee its stability over 64 Myr. Among the 4, this is the furthest satellite from Saturn, which makes it less affected by the resonances.

A perspective

The authors mention as a possible perspective the action of the non-gravitational forces, such as the solar radiation pressure and the plasma drag, which could affect the dynamics of such small bodies. I would like to add another one: the secular tides with Saturn, and the pull of the rings. They would induce drifts of the satellites, and of the resonances associated. The expected order of magnitude of these drifts would be an expansion of the orbits of a few km / tens of km per Myr. This seems pretty small, but not that small if we keep in mind that two resonances affecting Methone are separated by 4 km only.

This means that further results are to be expected in the upcoming years. The Cassini mission is close to its end, scheduled for 15 Sep 2017, but we are not done with exploiting its results!

To know more…

• The study, here: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx1537, also made freely available by the authors on arXiv, thanks to them for sharing!
• The web page of Marco Antonio Muñoz-Gutiérrez. You can follow him on Twitter here,
• The web page of Silvia Maria Giuliatti Winter.

That’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.