Simulating the Smallest Ring World of Chariklo

Abstract

A ring system consisting of two dense narrow rings has been discovered around Centaur Chariklo. The existence of these rings around a small object poses various questions, such as their origin, stability, and lifetime. In order to understand the nature of Chariklo's rings, we perform global $N$-body simulations of the self-gravitating collisional particle rings for the first time. We find that Chariklo should be denser than the ring material to avoid the rapid diffusion of the rings. If Chariklo is denser than the ring material, fine spiral structures called self-gravity wakes occur in the inner ring. These wakes accelerate the viscous spreading of the ring significantly and they typically occur on timescales of about $100\mathrm{years}$ for m-sized ring particles, which is considerably shorter than the timescales suggested in previous studies. The existence of these narrow rings implies smaller ring particles or the existence of shepherding satellites.

arXiv comment13 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

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• The Dynamical History Of 2060 Chiron And Its Proposed Ring System
• The dynamics of rings around Centaurs and Trans-Neptunian Objects
• Dynamics of Haumea's dust ring
• Rings of non-spherical, axisymmetric bodies
• Gravitational disturbance on asteroidal ring systems by close encounter with a small object
• Rings around irregular bodies. II. Numerical simulations of the 1/3 spin-orbit resonance confinement and applications to Chariklo
• GravityCam: Wide-Field High-Resolution High-Cadence Imaging Surveys in the Visible from the Ground
• Implementation and Performance of Barnes-Hut N-body algorithm on Extreme-scale Heterogeneous Many-core Architectures