Publication Date

5-10-2024

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Science Advances

Volume

10

Issue

19

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adl6601

Abstract

One of the stranger planetary rings is Saturn's narrow, clumpy F ring, lying just outside the main rings, in a region disturbed by chaotic orbital dynamics. We show that the F ring has a stable "true core"that dominates its mass and is confined into discontinuous short arcs of particles larger than a few millimeters in radius. The more obvious micron-size particles seen in images, outlining and obscuring the true core, contribute only a small fraction of its mass. We found that these arcs of large particles orbit Saturn in a specific corotational resonance with the nearby 100-kilometer diameter ringmoon Prometheus, which stabilizes the F ring material and allows it to persist within the disturbed region for decades or longer. Toward the end of the observing period, a small chaotic glitch in the orbit of Prometheus temporarily disrupted the confinement, but the arcs seem to be able to adapt.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Department

Electrical Engineering

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