A team of scientists from the Queen Mary University of London working with images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found few big objects punching through parts of Saturn’s F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.
Image shows a trail 155 km long that was dragged out from Saturn's F ring by an object about 1 km in diameter (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / QMUL)
These trails in the rings, which scientists are calling ‘mini-jets’, fill in a missing link in our understanding of the curious behavior of the F ring. The findings were presented on April 24 at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Scientists have known that relatively large objects like Saturn’s moon Prometheus can create channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring. But until now they didn’t know what happened to these snowballs after they were created.
The team has found evidence that some of the smaller snowballs survive, and their differing orbits mean they go on to strike through the F ring on their own.
“The F ring has a circumference of 550 thousand miles (881 thousand km) and these mini-jets are so tiny they took quite a bit of time and serendipity to find,” said Nick Attree, a Cassini imaging associate and a co-author of the study. “We combed through 20,000 images and were delighted to find 500 examples of these rogues during just the seven years Cassini has been at Saturn.”
The small objects appear to collide with the F ring at gentle speeds – something on the order of about 2 m per second. The collisions drag glittering ice particles out of the F ring with them, leaving a trail 20 to 110 miles (40 to 180 kilometers) long.
“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought,” explained lead author Prof. Carl Murray. “These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles in size, creating a spectacular show.”
In some cases, the objects traveled in packs, creating mini-jets that looked quite exotic, like the barb of a harpoon. Other new images show grand views of the entire F ring, showing the swirls and eddies that ripple around the ring from all the different kinds of objects moving through and around it.
“Beyond just showing us the strange beauty of the F ring, Cassini’s studies of this ring help us understand the activity that occurs when solar systems evolve out of dusty disks that are similar to, but obviously much grander than, the disk we see around Saturn,” added Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We can’t wait to see what else Cassini will show us in Saturn’s rings.”
