New answers tagged tidal-forces
3
In the first case, the planet's rotation will carry the tidal bulge ahead of the satellite, this will tend to accelerate the satellite, causing its orbit to recede. In the other cases, the planet's rotation will pull the bulge behind the satellite, causing the orbit to decay. It doesn't matter if the period is greater or smaller in the case of a ...
2
It is minute and inconsequential. Without tidal energy harvesting, the motion of the water is ultimately converted into heat, it has a very small heating effect (that is swamped by the heating caused by the sun). With tidal energy harvesting, instead of heating the water, a little of the energy is converted to electricity (which is then converted into light ...
2
This is for instance the case for the Saturn moons Enceladus and Dione.
This is not the case for Enceladus and Dione. Enceladus's orbit about Saturn has an eccentricity of 0.0047, which while low, is more than enough to result in tidal heating. Dione does play a role in the tidal heating of Enceladus, but that role is secondary. Dione is what keeps ...
17
There are four moons that are closer to Jupiter than Io with higher eccentricities, yet they don't seem to have any volcanism at their surface.
Only one of those innermost moons (Thebe) has an eccentricity higher than that of Io. The other three have lower eccentricities.
The reason they don't exhibit volcanism is because they are too small. The largest of ...
47
It’s because they are much smaller than Io. Tidal forces are differential forces, that is, they result from the difference in gravitational pull on one side of a body compared to the other. When an object is small, the difference in distance to the two sides of it is necessarily small as well.
According to Wikipedia, Amalthea, the largest of those four ...
6
tl;dr
The inner moons are much to small (and too stiff) to experience significant tidal work. They also cool down much faster though I don't think this is relevant in this case.
There're two things to look at, here:
The total amount of tidal work that is done on a moon
The amount of energy that is radiated away over time
When looking at the list of Jupiter'...
Top 50 recent answers are included
