Triton’s Captured Youth: Tidal Heating Kept Triton Warm and Active for Billions of Years

IF 3.8 Q2 ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS The Planetary Science Journal Pub Date : 2024-09-16 DOI:10.3847/psj/ad6744
N. P. Hammond and G. C. Collins
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Abstract

Neptune’s moon Triton has two remarkable attributes: its retrograde orbit suggests that it was captured from the Kuiper Belt, and Triton has one of the youngest surfaces of all the icy satellites in the solar system. Soon after capture, Triton experienced strong diurnal tides raised by Neptune, which caused intense deformation, heating, and melting of its ice shell as its highly eccentric initial orbit was circularized. While previous studies have suggested that Triton’s orbit would have circularized early in solar system history, we show that internal feedbacks between tidal heating and ice shell melting significantly reduce the orbital evolution rate, causing strong tidal heating to persist for billions of years. We simulate Triton’s post-capture evolution over a range of initial semimajor axes and ice shell properties. We find that Triton’s ice shell would have been extremely thin (1–10 km) for a period of 1–4 billion years, with tidal stresses strong enough to fracture the entire ice shell down to the subsurface ocean. A final phase of intense geologic activity may have occurred after tidal dissipation waned, in which late-stage ice shell thickening caused ocean pressurization potentially sufficient to refracture the ice shell and push water to the surface. Such overpressurization could have caused recent massive cryovolcanic resurfacing, perhaps explaining Triton’s geologically young surface. It is therefore possible that Triton’s youthful surface and its origin as a captured satellite may in fact be related. A long-lived subsurface ocean and extended thin ice shell period also greatly increase Triton’s astrobiological potential.
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海卫一俘获的青春潮汐加热让海卫一温暖活跃数十亿年
海王星的卫星海卫一有两个显著特征:它的逆行轨道表明它是从柯伊伯带捕获的,而且海卫一的表面是太阳系所有冰卫星中最年轻的。被捕获后不久,海卫一就经历了海王星掀起的强烈昼夜潮汐,这导致其冰壳强烈变形、加热和融化,因为它的高度偏心初始轨道被圆化了。虽然之前的研究表明海卫一的轨道在太阳系历史的早期就会环形化,但我们的研究表明,潮汐加热和冰壳融化之间的内部反馈大大降低了轨道演化的速度,导致强烈的潮汐加热持续了数十亿年。我们模拟了海卫一在一系列初始半主轴和冰壳特性下的捕获后演化。我们发现,海卫一的冰壳在10-40亿年的时间里会非常薄(1-10千米),潮汐应力足以使整个冰壳断裂,直至地表下的海洋。潮汐消散减弱后,可能会出现最后一个阶段的强烈地质活动,在这一阶段,晚期冰壳增厚造成的海洋增压可能足以使冰壳重新断裂,并将水推向地表。这种超压可能会导致最近大规模的低温火山重新浮出海面,这或许可以解释海卫一在地质学上年轻的表面。因此,海卫一年轻的表面和它作为一颗被俘获卫星的起源实际上可能是相关的。长寿命的地表下海洋和延长的薄冰壳期也大大增加了海卫一的天体生物学潜力。
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来源期刊
The Planetary Science Journal
The Planetary Science Journal Earth and Planetary Sciences-Geophysics
CiteScore
5.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
249
审稿时长
15 weeks
期刊最新文献
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