Through a Glass Darkly: Saturn's Enigmatic B Ring

Details Through a Glass Darkly: Saturn's Enigmatic B Ring Through a Glass Darkly: Saturn's Enigmatic B Ring

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.0704n&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #7.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.420

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

The structure and dynamics of Saturn's B ring, probably 75% of the total mass in the ring system, remain largely unknown due to its high optical depth. It does, however, exhibit both regional and local variations in visible color, as revealed by Voyager images (Estrada & Cuzzi 1996). Reflectance spectra obtained by Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) show significant variations in water ice band depths which are strongly correlated with these visible colors. Comparisons of the rings' transmission profile from selected VIMS stellar occultations support the finding (Colwell etal., 2007) that self-gravity wakes are as ubiquitous in the B ring as they are in the A ring. Fits to a simple wake model suggest that most of the fine-scale structure in the B ring is due to variations in the width of the interwake gaps, while the optical depth in the `gaps' remains relatively constant. Tentatively we attribute κgap to a 'haze' of somewhat smaller particles which may envelop a thinner layer of meter-size, self-gravitating particles (Salo & Karjalainen 2003).
Cassini radio and stellar occultations show that the B ring may be divided into four regions with distinct characteristics (Marouf, etal., 2006). Of particular interest is region B2 (radius 99,000 - 104,500 km), which consists of sharply-defined bands 100 - 500 km wide where the optical depth alternates between 1.3 and >3.0. A close inspection of the optical depth distribution in this region suggests that there is a critical τ [?] 2.0, near which the rings' radial structure becomes irregular and above which the rings are essentially opaque. This threshhold also corresponds to a marked change in ice band depths, and may represent a transition between a closely-packed monolayer and a much more opaque multilayer, or possibly a local "crystallization'' in the rings (Tremaine 2003).

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