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Young Surface of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia Caused by Viscous Relaxation

  • Authors: Qiang Wei, Yongyun Hu, Yonggang Liu, Douglas N. C. Lin, Jun Yang, and Adam P. Showman

2018 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 856 L14.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 3.

Crater relaxation times with (a) different temperatures, (b) crater depth, (c) N2 ice thickness, and (d) crater diameters. The benchmark case is 38 K with a crater that is initially 2 km deep, 40 km in diameter on 4 km thick ice. Each test shown in (a)–(d) varies by one parameter. The red dots and lines represent the timescale for the crater to relax to a depth of 25 m. The black curves are the relaxation times estimated from scaling analysis for τthin, i.e., Equations (3) and (4) in Section 2, and fitted to the numerical result.

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