COLLISIONAL SIMULATIONS OF SATELLITE LINDBLAD RESONANCES

The influence of a perturbing satellite on a planetary ring at isolated Lindblad resonances is studied with numerical computer simulations, combining Aarseth's force polynomial method for orbit integrations with the calculation of particle-particle impacts. Observed torque exchange between the satellite and the dissipative non-self-gravitating ring agrees with the theoretical torque for a gravitating ring to within 20%. This verifies that angular momentum exchange is not very sensitive to the details of the dominant physical processes. The theoretical estimate for the formation of a gap at a 2:1 inner Lindblad resonance is also shown to be of the correct order of magnitude. The theoretically predicted flux- reversal phenomenon due to streamline distortion is also verified. The reversal of angular momentum luminosity occurs already for the nonlinearity parameter q {reversed tilde equals} 0.20-0.30 in our simulations with low optical depth, τ {reversed tilde equals} 0.02. © 1992.