An Evolving View of Saturn's Dynamic Rings

J. N. Cuzzi (1) , J. A. Burns (2) , S. Charnoz (3) , R. N. Clark (4) , J. E. Colwell (5) , L. Dones (6) , L. W. Esposito (7) , G. Filacchione (8) , R. G. French (9) , M. M. Hedman (2) , S. Kempf (10) , E. A. Marouf (11) , C. D. Murray (12) , P. D. Nicholson (2) , C. C. Porco (13) , Julien Schmidt (14) , M. R. Showalter (15) , L. J. Spilker (16) , J. N. Spitale (13) , R. Srama (10) , M. Sremčević (7) , M. S. Tiscareno (2) , J. Weiss (13, 17)

1 ARC - NASA Ames Research Center
2 Department of Astronomy [Ithaca]
3 AIM (UMR_7158 / UMR_E_9005 / UM_112) - Astrophysique Interprétation Modélisation
4 US Geological Survey [Denver]
5 UCF | Physics - Department of Physics [Orlando]
6 Department of Space Studies [Boulder]
7 LASP - Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics [Boulder]
8 IASF-Roma - Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica cosmica - Roma
9 Astronomy Department [Wellesley]
10 MPIK - Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik
11 Electrical Engineering Department
12 AU - Astronomy Unit [London]
13 CICLOPS - Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations
14 Institute for Physics and Astronomy
15 SETI Institute
16 JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
17 Carleton College

We review our understanding of Saturn's rings after nearly 6 years of observations by the Cassini spacecraft. Saturn's rings are composed mostly of water ice but also contain an undetermined reddish contaminant. The rings exhibit a range of structure across many spatial scales; some of this involves the interplay of the fluid nature and the self-gravity of innumerable orbiting centimeter- to meter-sized particles, and the effects of several peripheral and embedded moonlets, but much remains unexplained. A few aspects of ring structure change on time scales as short as days. It remains unclear whether the vigorous evolutionary processes to which the rings are subject imply a much younger age than that of the solar system. Processes on view at Saturn have parallels in circumstellar disks.

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Astrophysics [astro-ph]

J. N. Cuzzi, J. A. Burns, S. Charnoz, R. N. Clark, J. E. Colwell, et al.. An Evolving View of Saturn's Dynamic Rings. Science, 2010, 327 (5972), pp.1470-1475. ⟨10.1126/science.1179118⟩. ⟨cea-00865799⟩