Titan is drifting away from Saturn 100 times faster than we thought

[Admin]

Saturn's moon Titan is zooming away from its ringed parent 100 times faster than scientists expected.

Titan is drifting away from Saturn 100 times faster than we thought : Read more

 

[rod]

FYI, there are a number of reports from the past showing some of Saturn's moons moving away faster than thought, e.g. https://phys.org/news/2016-12-saturn-bulging-core-implies-moons.html "The team also found that Saturn moon Rhea is moving away 10 times faster than the other moons, which is the first evidence that a planet's dissipation factor can vary with its distance in relation to the moon. The scientists have no definitive explanation."

Titan is apparently expanding its orbit about 11 cm/year moving away from Saturn in this new report on Titan, https://phys.org/news/2020-06-titan-migrating-saturn-faster-previously.html, and the space.com report.

A number of Saturn moons reported with Love number and expanding their orbits away from Saturn are documented now. These moons could all be young too, not 4.5 billion years old, similar to young ring age estimates.

 

[Helio]

Thanks Rod. That's interesting. Do you recall which moons of Saturn, especially Titan, have resonance? If they do, resonance would require that all those in the resonance would move outward if just one moved outward.

Since the rings are young and likely came from a major impact, wouldn't orbital instability still be taking place as a result of an intruder(s), or has it been too long?

 

[rod]

FYI, I have not done a deep dive into Saturn moons resonance but observed some earlier reports on the subject indicating some of the moons are expanding outward faster than anticipated it looks like. http://phys.org/news/2016-03-moons-saturn-younger-dinosaurs.html, https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/saturns-young-moons-1504201623/, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017Icar..281..286L, "...In addition, significant tidal dissipation within Saturn is confirmed (Lainey et al., 2012) corresponding to a high present-day tidal ratio k2/Q=(1.59 ± 0.74) × 10^-4 and implying fast orbital expansions of the Moons."

Similar issue for our Moon. In the giant impact model, our Moon forms about 3 earth radii distance, today it orbits a bit more than 60 earth radii distance, expanded outward by some 20x or more its distance.

 

[Eduardo Canto]

In the very distant future, is it possible that Saturn loses Titan? What are the chances of it being pulled by the Sun's gravity? If the chances are high, how could Earth's orbit be affected? Can we trace any parallel between the orbit's migration of moons and planets and the electrons in relation to the nuclei of atoms or they would be under completely different set of laws, Newtonian and Quantum mechanics?

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[mundane]

They were off by two orders of magnitude?

"This implies that the Saturnian moon system, and potentially its rings, have formed and evolved more dynamically than previously believed.”

Well, that's the nice way to say it. Why don't we just state the truth. This implies that they really have no idea what they are talking about!

If your model makes predictions that are this far off, it doesn't say much for the trustworthiness of your model!

So does this imply that Titan would have had to form close to Saturn in order to be where it is now? If so, wouldn't a planet the size of Titan have created havoc among the inner moons of Saturn? Is that really a viable option?