Tiny, unseen moon could be holding bizarre space rock Chariklo's rings in place

[Admin]

A little moonlet, too small to be seen from Earth, could be playing cosmic sheepdog by shaping the thin rings around the distant minor planet Chariklo, according to new computer simulations.

Tiny, unseen moon could be holding bizarre space rock Chariklo's rings in place : Read more

 

[rod]

The 14 page PDF is detailed and another indicator of young ages seen in the solar system, commonly dated some 4.6 Gyr using meteorites ages. Recent catastrophism in the solar system is what such reports look like, Mimas young ocean along with other ring ages like at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Ref - Numerical Simulations of (10199) Chariklo's Rings with a Resonant Perturber, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad151c, 06-Feb-2024. "Abstract The discovery of two thin rings around the ∼ 250 km sized Centaur Chariklo was the first of its kind, and their formation and evolutionary mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we explore a single shepherd satellite as a mechanism to confine Chariklo's rings. We also investigate the impact of such a perturber on reaccretion, which is a likely process for material located outside the Roche limit...Centaurs are thought to evolve inward from the outer Solar System, and their unstable orbits typically cross those of the giant planets. The dynamical lifetimes of Centaurs are only a few million years, mostly being ejected from the Solar System/entering the Oort cloud or transitioning into Jupiter-family comets (e.g., Tiscareno & Malhotra 2003)...The ring locations and thin widths are keys to understanding the Chariklo system. Over relatively short timescales, <1 Myr, Chariklo's rings should naturally disperse (Braga-Ribas et al. 2014). Goldreich & Tremaine (1979) proposed that narrow, eccentric rings like those at Uranus have apse alignment due to self-gravity. Pan & Wu (2016) built on that idea for Chariklo, developing a simple model that combined the ellipticity of the nucleus and the particles' self-gravity to maintain apse alignment. They determined a mass for the inner ring (a few times 10^16 g) and a spreading time of ∼10^5 yr."

My note, I did not see how long the ring system could last using a shepherd satellite, e.g. from the Conclusion in the paper: "The simulation phase space explored here is not exhaustive, but it does provide representative conditions under which a Chariklo-like ring can be maintained."