ASTRON 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Comet Nucleus, Ellipse, Solar Wind
18 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
Jupiter"s large moons get less dense as you go out going from iron to rocky, to icy just like planets in the solar system. Jupiter probably had a disk around the hot young planet and formed regular moons like planets around a star (forwards or prograde orbits). Tides get weaker with distance greatest to least heating: io, europa, ganymede, callisto. Irregular moons (small, can be orbiting backwards retrograde) are probably captured asteroids. Europa: jupiter"s tidal heating should be too low for volcanism, but should keep a subsurface sea liquid: broken slabs of ice that appear to have floated. Ganymede (jupiter) shows signs of gradually filled-in craters. Bright terrain from some unknown past tectonic processes. Some moons of saturn and uranus also appear this way. It has a thick, dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere the only moon that does. Methane appears to experience a cycle like rain on earth, involving methane lakes and clouds.
