Moonlets In Saturn's A Ring: Fragments Of A Shattered Moon?

Details Moonlets In Saturn's A Ring: Fragments Of A Shattered Moon? Moonlets In Saturn's A Ring: Fragments Of A Shattered Moon?

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.1004s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #10.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.426

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

The question on the origin and evolution of planetary rings is one of the prominent unsolved problems of planetary sciences with direct implications for planet-forming processes in preplanetary disks. The recent detection of four propeller-shaped features in Saturn's A ring (Tiscareno et al., 2006, Nature) proved the presence of large boulder-sized moonlets in the rings. Their very existence favours a ring creation in a catastrophic disruption of an icy satellite rather than a co-genetic origin together with Saturn, since bodies of this size can hardly have accreted inside the rings. Here, we report the detection of eight new propellers in an Cassini ISS NAC image sequence that covers the complete A ring, indicating embedded moonlets with radii between 30m-70m. We show that the moonlets found so far are concentrated in a narrow 3,000km wide annulus at 130,000km distance from Saturn. Compared to the main population of smaller ring particles (s<10m) such embedded moonlets have a short lifetime with respect to meteoroid impacts. Thus, they are likely the remnants of a shattered ring-moon of Pan-size or larger, locally contributing new material to the older ring. This supports the theory of catastrophic ring creation in a collisional cascade.

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