Saturn's Rings as a Seismograph to Probe Saturn's Internal Structure
- Creators
- Mankovich, Christopher R.
Abstract
As it has already done for Earth, the Sun, and the stars, seismology has the potential to radically change the way the interiors of giant planets are studied. In a sequence of events foreseen by only a few, observations of Saturn's rings by the Cassini spacecraft have rapidly broken ground on giant planet seismology. Gravity directly couples the planet's normal mode oscillations to the orbits of ring particles, generating spiral waves whose frequencies encode Saturn's internal structure and rotation. These modes have revealed a stably stratified region near Saturn's center and provided a new constraint on Saturn's rotation.
Additional Information
© 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Received 19 JAN 2020; Accepted 8 MAR 2020. I wish to thank Francis Nimmo, David Al‐Attar, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on this manuscript. I also gratefully acknowledge support from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. Figures 2 and 3 were created with the aid of code by Keaton J. Bell.Attached Files
Published - 2019AV000142.pdf
Submitted - 2007.12703.pdf
Supplemental Material - aga220027-sup-0001-2019av000142-si_other-s01.pdf
Supplemental Material - aga220027-sup-0002-2019av000142-si_other-s02.pdf
Supplemental Material - aga220027-sup-0003-2019av000142-si_other-s03.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 103137
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200512-104812023
- Caltech Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
- Created
-
2020-05-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field