Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell
The ice shell on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, exhibits strong asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, with all known geysers concentrated over the south pole, even though the expected pattern of tidal-rotational deformation should be symmetric between the north and south poles....
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Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.12554 |
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ftdatacite:10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 2023-05-15T18:22:37+02:00 Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell Kang, Wanying Flierl, Glenn 2019 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.12554 unknown arXiv arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences Article CreativeWork article Preprint 2019 ftdatacite https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 2022-03-10T16:32:56Z The ice shell on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, exhibits strong asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, with all known geysers concentrated over the south pole, even though the expected pattern of tidal-rotational deformation should be symmetric between the north and south poles. Using an idealized ice evolution model, we demonstrate that this asymmetry may form spontaneously, without any noticeable a priori asymmetry (such as a giant impact or a monopole structure of geological activity), in contrast to previous studies. Infinitesimal asymmetry in the ice shell thickness due to random perturbations are found to be able to grow indefinitely, ending up significantly thinning the ice shell at one of the poles, thereby allowing fracture formation there. Necessary conditions to trigger this hemispheric symmetry breaking mechanism are found analytically. A rule of thumb we find is that, for Galilean and Saturnian icy moons, the ice shell can undergo hemispheric symmetry breaking only if the mean shell thickness is around 10-30~km. Article in Journal/Newspaper South pole DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) South Pole Thumb ENVELOPE(-64.259,-64.259,-65.247,-65.247) |
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DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) |
op_collection_id |
ftdatacite |
language |
unknown |
topic |
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences |
spellingShingle |
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences Kang, Wanying Flierl, Glenn Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
topic_facet |
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences |
description |
The ice shell on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, exhibits strong asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, with all known geysers concentrated over the south pole, even though the expected pattern of tidal-rotational deformation should be symmetric between the north and south poles. Using an idealized ice evolution model, we demonstrate that this asymmetry may form spontaneously, without any noticeable a priori asymmetry (such as a giant impact or a monopole structure of geological activity), in contrast to previous studies. Infinitesimal asymmetry in the ice shell thickness due to random perturbations are found to be able to grow indefinitely, ending up significantly thinning the ice shell at one of the poles, thereby allowing fracture formation there. Necessary conditions to trigger this hemispheric symmetry breaking mechanism are found analytically. A rule of thumb we find is that, for Galilean and Saturnian icy moons, the ice shell can undergo hemispheric symmetry breaking only if the mean shell thickness is around 10-30~km. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Kang, Wanying Flierl, Glenn |
author_facet |
Kang, Wanying Flierl, Glenn |
author_sort |
Kang, Wanying |
title |
Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
title_short |
Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
title_full |
Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
title_fullStr |
Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
title_full_unstemmed |
Spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on Enceladus' ice shell |
title_sort |
spontaneous formation of geysers at only one pole on enceladus' ice shell |
publisher |
arXiv |
publishDate |
2019 |
url |
https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.12554 |
long_lat |
ENVELOPE(-64.259,-64.259,-65.247,-65.247) |
geographic |
South Pole Thumb |
geographic_facet |
South Pole Thumb |
genre |
South pole |
genre_facet |
South pole |
op_rights |
arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1912.12554 |
_version_ |
1766202030779531264 |