AST101H5 Lecture Notes - Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt, Unification Church
Document Summary
Jupiter"s moon europa: fresh surface of ice w/ cracks: tidally heated water below the ice. Saturn"s moon titan: dense atmosphere of n2 w/ lakes of methane and ethane. Saturn"s rings = not solid but consist of billions of objects from 10m to dust size in orbits. Use kirchhoff"s 3rd law again: observe the spectrum of sunlight reflected by rings compare spectrum coming from sun any extra absorption = due to rings match to samples of earth. All jovian planets have large families of moons (small/medium) made of rocks and ice. Because ice is brittle and fragile the satellites fragment when they collide. Tides pull apart the fragments into rings. Solar systems smaller objects are different that major planets: asteroids minor planets, meteoroids, comets, dwarf planets (2006) Aster = star; oid = body an object that looks like a star but it orbits the sun. Largest = now known = 1000 km in diameter.
