No Arabic abstract
Propellers are features in Saturns A ring associated with moonlets that open partial gaps. They exhibit non-Keplerian motion (Tiscareno 2010); the longitude residuals of the best-observed propeller, Bleriot, appear consistent with a sinusoid of period ~4 years. Pan and Chiang (2010) proposed that propeller moonlets librate in frog resonances with co-orbiting ring material. By analogy with the restricted three-body problem, they treated the co-orbital material as stationary in the rotating frame and neglected non-co-orbital material. Here we use simple numerical experiments to extend the frog model, including feedback due to the gaps motion, and drag associated with the Lindblad disk torques that cause Type I migration. Because the moonlet creates the gap, we expect the gap centroid to track the moonlet, but only after a time delay t_diff, the time for a ring particle to travel from conjunction with the moonlet to the end of the gap. We find that frog librations can persist only if t_diff exceeds the frog libration period P_lib, and if damping from Lindblad torques balances driving from co-orbital torques. If t_diff << P_lib, then the libration amplitude damps to zero. In the case of Bleriot, the frog resonance model can reproduce the observed libration period P_lib ~ 4 yr. However, our simple feedback prescription suggests that Bleriots t_diff ~ 0.01P_lib, which is inconsistent with the observed libration amplitude of 260 km. We urge more accurate treatments of feedback to test the assumptions of our toy models.
[Abridged] We present an extensive suite of terrestrial planet formation simulations that allows quantitative analysis of the stochastic late stages of planet formation. We quantify the feeding zone width, Delta a, as the mass-weighted standard deviation of the initial semi-major axes of the planetary embryos and planetesimals that make up the final planet. The size of a planets feeding zone in our simulations does not correlate with its final mass or semi-major axis, suggesting there is no systematic trend between a planets mass and its volatile inventory. Instead, we find that the feeding zone of any planet more massive than 0.1M_Earth is roughly proportional to the radial extent of the initial disk from which it formed: Delta a~0.25(a_max-a_min), where a_min and a_max are the inner and outer edge of the initial planetesimal disk. These wide stochastic feeding zones have significant consequences for the origin of the Moon, since the canonical scenario predicts the Moon should be primarily composed of material from Earths last major impactor (Theia), yet its isotopic composition is indistinguishable from Earth. In particular, we find that the feeding zones of Theia analogs are significantly more stochastic than the planetary analogs. Depending on our assumed initial distribution of oxygen isotopes within the planetesimal disk, we find a ~5% or less probability that the Earth and Theia will form with an isotopic difference equal to or smaller than the Earth and Moons. In fact we predict that every planetary mass body should be expected to have a unique isotopic signature. In addition, we find paucities of massive Theia analogs and high velocity moon-forming collisions, two recently proposed explanations for the Moons isotopic composition. Our work suggests that there is still no scenario for the Moons origin that explains its isotopic composition with a high probability event.
Much of the science from the exoplanets detected by the TESS mission relies on precisely predicted transit times that are needed for many follow-up characterization studies. We investigate ephemeris deterioration for simulated TESS planets and find that the ephemerides of 81% of those will have expired (i.e. 1$sigma$ mid-transit time uncertainties greater than 30 minutes) one year after their TESS observations. We verify these results using a sample of TESS planet candidates as well. In particular, of the simulated planets that would be recommended as JWST targets by Kempton et al. (2018), $sim$80% will have mid-transit time uncertainties $>$ 30 minutes by the earliest time JWST would observe them. This rapid deterioration is driven primarily by the relatively short time baseline of TESS observations. We describe strategies for maintaining TESS ephemerides fresh through follow-up transit observations. We find that the longer the baseline between the TESS and the follow-up observations, the longer the ephemerides stay fresh, and that 51% of simulated primary mission TESS planets will require space-based observations. The recently-approved extension to the TESS mission will rescue the ephemerides of most (though not all) primary mission planets, but the benefits of these new observations can only be reaped two years after the primary mission observations. Moreover, the ephemerides of most primary mission TESS planets (as well as those newly discovered during the extended mission) will again have expired by the time future facilities such as the ELTs, Ariel and the possible LUVOIR/OST missions come online, unless maintenance follow-up observations are obtained.
The core accretion theory of planet formation has at least two fundamental problems explaining the origins of Uranus and Neptune: (1) dynamical times in the trans-Saturnian solar nebula are so long that core growth can take > 15 Myr, and (2) the onset of runaway gas accretion that begins when cores reach 10 Earth masses necessitates a sudden gas accretion cutoff just as the ice giant cores reach critical mass. Both problems may be resolved by allowing the ice giants to migrate outward after their formation in solid-rich feeding zones with planetesimal surface densities well above the minimum-mass solar nebula. We present new simulations of the formation of Uranus and Neptune in the solid-rich disk of Dodson-Robinson et al. (2009) using the initial semimajor axis distribution of the Nice model (Gomes et al. 2005; Morbidelli et al. 2005; Tsiganis et al. 2005), with one ice giant forming at 12 AU and the other at 15 AU. The innermost ice giant reaches its present mass after 3.8-4.0 Myr and the outermost after 5.3-6 Myr, a considerable time decrease from previous one-dimensional simulations (e.g. Pollack et al. 1996). The core masses stay subcritical, eliminating the need for a sudden gas accretion cutoff. Our calculated carbon mass fractions of 22% are in excellent agreement with the ice giant interior models of Podolak et al. (1995) and Marley et al. (1995). Based on the requirement that the ice giant-forming planetesimals contain >10% mass fractions of methane ice, we can reject any solar system formation model that initially places Uranus and Neptune inside the orbit of Saturn. We also demonstrate that a large population of planetesimals must be present in both ice giant feeding zones throughout the lifetime of the gaseous nebula.
Let $W^{(n)}$ be the $n$-letter word obtained by repeating a fixed word $W$, and let $R_n$ be a random $n$-letter word over the same alphabet. We show several results about the length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) between $W^{(n)}$ and $R_n$; in particular, we show that its expectation is $gamma_W n-O(sqrt{n})$ for an efficiently-computable constant $gamma_W$. This is done by relating the problem to a new interacting particle system, which we dub frog dynamics. In this system, the particles (`frogs) hop over one another in the order given by their labels. Stripped of the labeling, the frog dynamics reduces to a variant of the PushTASEP. In the special case when all symbols of $W$ are distinct, we obtain an explicit formula for the constant $gamma_W$ and a closed-form expression for the stationary distribution of the associated frog dynamics. In addition, we propose new conjectures about the asymptotic of the LCS of a pair of random words. These conjectures are informed by computer experiments using a new heuristic algorithm to compute the LCS. Through our computations, we found periodic words that are more random-like than a random word, as measured by the LCS.
We introduce a two-player game involving two tokens located at points of a fixed set. The players take turns to move a token to an unoccupied point in such a way that the distance between the two tokens is decreased. Optimal strategies for this game and its variants are intimately tied to Gale-Shapley stable marriage. We focus particularly on the case of random infinite sets, where we use invariance, ergodicity, mass transport, and deletion-tolerance to determine game outcomes.