Abstract
Abstract A dusty ringlet designated R/2006 S3, also known as the “Charming Ringlet,” is located around 119,940 km from the center of Saturn within the Laplace Gap in the Cassini Division. Prior to 2010, the ringlet had a simple radial profile and a predictable eccentric shape with two components, one forced by solar radiation pressure and the other freely precessing around the planet. However, observations made by the Cassini spacecraft since late 2012 revealed a shelf of material extending inwards from the ringlet that was not present in the earlier observations. Closer inspection of images obtained after 2012 shows that sometime between 2010 and 2012, the freely precessing component of the ringlet’s eccentricity increased by over 50%, and that for at least 3 yr after 2012, the ringlet had longitudinal brightness variations that rotated around the planet at a range of rates corresponding to ∼60 km in orbital semimajor axis. Some event therefore disturbed this ringlet between 2010 and late 2012.
Highlights
Saturn’s complex ring system includes multiple broad rings and narrow ringlets that are primarily composed of particles less than 100 microns across
Several of these dusty rings have been observed to change significantly over timescales of years to decades. Most often these changes include the formation of bright clumps of material (French et al 2012; Hedman et al 2013; Hedman 2019), but in other cases they involve larger scale structural changes that can be attributed to variations in periodic perturbing forces or discrete disturbances spanning broad ring regions (Chancia et al 2019; Hedman and Showalter 2016)
This paper describes a new type of timevariable phenomena in dusty rings, where the radial profile and orbit shape of a narrow ringlet appears to have suddenly changed
Summary
Saturn’s complex ring system includes multiple broad rings and narrow ringlets that are primarily composed of particles less than 100 microns across. Unlike the millimeter-to-meter sized particles that dominate the main ring system, these dusty rings are sensitive to a variety of non-gravitational forces that can influence their structure and dynamics Several of these dusty rings have been observed to change significantly over timescales of years to decades. These data indicate that something happened to this ringlet over the course of the Cassini mission that changed its overall structure.
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