Gooooooood morning London! Today at #DPS2022 I'll be checking out Uranus and Saturn's rings, changes at Pluto since the New Horizons flyby, interstellar traveling rocks, outer planet irregular satellites, and keeping an ear out for early JWST results.
I barely made it to the rings session in time to see Matt Hedman show off some new results on a big brightening of a dusty ring at Uranus, revealed in part by some terrific reprocessing of Voyager data by an amateur, @IanARegan. Nice work, Ian!
It's a little too early in the morning for me to comprehend Bill Hubbard's talk, but the idea that the rate that Titan is receding from Saturn, the precession of Saturn's spin axis, and the cyclical change in tilt of Neptune's spin axis are all linked is...wow. #DPS2022
(Not totally sure I got all that correct, but the main point is: spinny planets + orbity moons + gravity yields connections across billions of km over billions of years. It seems like magic but the physics works. Mind-blowing.) #DPS2022
Ha, Hubbard has just shown that the Neptune connection part of it does not work. Oh well. It was beautiful for the 2 minutes it seemed real.
A better summary of Hedman's presentation. Heidi told me yesterday that the first JWST Uranus opportunity was clobbered by the DART impact (and rightfully so; Uranus isn't going anywhere). But the amazing Neptune images from JWST sure are promising!
https://twitter.com/hbhammel/status/1577642499895709696
Now Jack Wisdom is saying that the Neptune connection for Saturn's obliquity and Titan's recession may have been real, if there were another moon (which he calls "Chrysalis" for some reason) that isn't there now because got disrupted to make the rings ~100 Myr ago. #DPS2022
I've jumped from the rings session to the meteoroids session. Interesting talk from Peter Brown looking for evidence of rubble-pile asteroids in fireball data. He concludes that plausibly ~20% of fireballs are from these, but that we need to be looking higher than 90km. #DPS2022
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