Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.1003s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #10.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.426
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
S-shaped brightness variations, called propellers, have recently been discovered in Saturn's A-ring (Tiscareno et al 2006). These structures were predicted by Spahn and Sremcevic (2000) to be caused by tiny moons (< 500 meter in diameter) embedded in the rings. These features reflect the interplay between moonlet gravity and ring-particle collitions. Since all propellers so far were observed in backlit geometry, it is not completely clear if the enhanced brightness corresponds to the density depleted (gaps) or denser regions (adjacent wakes) of the propeller.
Results of local box simulations are presented. We investigate the azimuthal extent of the moonlet induced wake crests for different model parameters, especially its dependence on the moonlet size. For very small moonlets the wakes start to damp after about two wake cycles near the point of streamline crossing in the non-collisional model. We emphasise the differences in the azimuthal scaling behaviour between the moonlet-wakes and gaps and discuss the results in the context of recent observations.
Albers Nicole
Miodrag Sremčević
Salo Heikki
Schmidt Jonas
Seiss Martin
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