Dust from Jupiter's Gossamer Ring and the Galilean Satellites

Details Dust from Jupiter's Gossamer Ring and the Galilean Satellites Dust from Jupiter's Gossamer Ring and the Galilean Satellites

Jun 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.1801h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #18.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1123

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

The orbital motion of dust near Jupiter is dominated by planetary gravity and the electromagnetic (EM) force due to motion through the intense jovian magnetic field. Large (micron-sized) grains are gravity-dominated and follow nearly circular orbits around Jupiter, while very small (nanometer-sized) grains are EM-dominated and gyrate about magnetic field lines; both are tightly bound to Jupiter. Interestingly, intermediate (submicron-sized) positively-charged dust grains are rapidly accelerated away from Jupiter to form dust streams. Here we present numerical integrations that show that negatively-charged submicron-sized grains remain bound to Jupiter indefinitely for a rotationally symmetric magnetic field, but for timescales of only months to years for the actual configuration of the jovian field. This result has a number of interesting implications. First, since submicron-sized dust grains launched from Io become negatively-charged in Io's plasma torus, they remain bound in the torus for several months and have time to spread into a ring. In addition, much of the temporarily-trapped dust re-collides with Io at high velocities (since the dust is strongly accelerated by EM-forces). This leads to more ejecta and, very possibly, a collisionally self-sustained population of dust. Our results also indicate that positively-charged submicron-sized dust escaping from the jovian Gossamer ring, can penetrate through the Io torus (in addition to flying over and under it). Most of these submicron particles eventually reach interplanetary space where they have been detected by the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft. Rings of material should not form around Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto since the positively-charged dust expected outside the Io torus is rapidly accelerated away from Jupiter. But all of the Galilean satellites intercept high velocity grains from the inner jovian system (and from interplanetary and interstellar space) and effectively magnify the near-moon number densities via the production of collisional ejecta. We predict that Galileo will see a significant enhancement in the dust flux within a few radii of each of the Galilean satellites due to collisional production of submicron dust.

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