Paper of Bartuccelli & Dean appears in Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society

The paper “Periodic and quasi-periodic attractors for the spin-orbit evolution of Mercury with a realistic tidal torque“, co-authored by M.V. Bartuccelli, J.H.B. Deane, and G. Gentile (Roma III) has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In the paper, they make a detailed study of the spin-orbit dynamics of Mercury, as predicted by the realistic model which has been recently introduced in a series of papers mainly by Efroimsky and Makarov. The paper presents numerical and analytical results concerning the nature of the librations of Mercury’s spin in the 3:2 resonance. The results provide evidence that the librations are quasi-periodic in time, consisting of a slow oscillation, with an amplitude of order of arcminutes, superimposed on the 88-day libration. This contrasts with recent astronomical observations and hence suggests that the 3:2 resonance in which Mercury has been trapped might have been originally described by a large-amplitude quasi-periodic libration which, only at a later stage, with the formation of a molten core, evolved into the small-amplitude libration which is observed nowadays.