Re: mars and venus (long)

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Stephen Murray wrote:

> As I mentioned earlier, a "swarm" of rocks coming from larger orbits
> will be moving faster than the protoplanet by the time that they hit it,
> due to their higher specific orbital angular momentum.  But, they
> apparently "pepper" one entire hemisphere more-or-less uniformly.

I imagine that a slight difference from uniformity would have major
effects over long time periods.

The protoplanet would clear a channel in the dust-cloud at the location of
its orbit, but also would "sculpt" the dust cloud by ejecting any
particles which happened to fall into orbital resonance.  The shape of the
dust cloud in the region of the protoplanet might not be simple (recall
the complexities of Saturn's rings.)  Material from higher or lower orbits
would leak into the empty space and accumulate on the planet, but if the
trajectory of this material had a slight bias towards the planet's limb
rather than being aimed directly at its center (on average), it would
deposit anglular momentum in the form of spin.  If the effect was small,
then perhaps planets would never spin fast.  If the effect was large, then
early in their history the planets might have been fast-spinning oblates
which slowly spewed material from their equators and out into a
ring-system.  I wonder... might this effect control the size of planets?
A small planet would experience a more uniform bombardment and might
slow down its spin, while a large planet would quickly accumulate spin and
start losing material.

(I wonder if such a phenomenon occurs in Saturn's rings?  If it does, then
perhaps some of the moonlets in Saturn's rings should be spinning
dangerously fast.  If they don't spin much at all, then that would
indicate that the deposited material strikes them uniformly.


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