Related papers: Origin and Evolution of Saturn's Ring System
The innovative Saturn Ring Skimmer mission concept enables a wide range of investigations that address fundamental questions about Saturn and its rings, as well as giant planets and astrophysical disk systems in general. This mission would…
For its beautiful rings, active atmosphere and mysterious magnetic field, Saturn is a fascinating planet. It also holds some of the keys to understanding the formation of our Solar System and the evolution of giant planets in general. While…
Rings are ubiquitous around giant planets in our Solar System. They evolve jointly with the nearby satellite system. They could form either during the giant planet formation process or much later, as a result of large scale dynamical…
The origin of Saturn\' s massive ring system is still unknown. Two popular scenarios - the tidal splitting of passing comets and the collisional destruction of a satellite - rely on a high cometary flux in the past. In the present paper we…
The hypothesis of a recent origin of Saturn's rings and its mid-sized moons is actively debated. It was suggested that a proto-Rhea and a proto-Dione might have collided recently, giving birth to the modern system of mid-sized moons. It is…
Seismology of the gas giants holds the potential to resolve long-standing questions about their internal structure and rotation state. We construct a family of Saturn interior models constrained by the gravity field and compute their…
The origin of Saturn's rings has been debated for decades. Measurements from Voyager and Cassini have suggested that the rings could be as young as ~100 Myr and composed of nearly pure water ice. Several scenarios have been proposed to…
We review our current understanding of the interior structure and thermal evolution of Saturn, with a focus on recent results in the Cassini era. There has been important progress in understanding physical inputs, including equations of…
Planetary rings sustain a continual bombardment of hypervelocity meteoroids that erode the surfaces of ring particles on time scales of 10^5 - 10^7 years. The debris ejected from such impacts re-accretes on to the ring, though often at a…
Saturn possesses a dynamically rich system containing numerous moons and impressive rings. Whether the rings of Saturn are much younger than the planet itself has been a long-open question; more recently a young age has been proposed for…
The origin of rings around giant planets remains elusive. Saturn's rings are massive and made of 90-95% of water ice. In contrast, the much less massive rings of Uranus and Neptune are dark and likely to have higher rock fraction. Here we…
We simulate the collision of precursor icy moons analogous to Dione and Rhea as a possible origin for Saturn's remarkably young rings. Such an event could have been triggered a few hundred million years ago by resonant instabilities in a…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
The unexpected finding of a ring system around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo opened a new window for dynamical studies and posed many questions about the formation and evolutionary mechanisms of Centaurs as well as the relationship to…
Many small moonlets, creating propeller structures, have been found in Saturn's rings by the Cassini spacecraft. We study the dynamical evolution of such 20-50m sized bodies which are embedded in Saturn's rings. We estimate the importance…
Until 2013, only the giant planets were known to host ring systems. In June 2013, a stellar occulation revealed the presence of narrow and dense rings around Chariklo, a small Centaur object that orbits between Saturn and Uranus. Meanwhile,…
Saturn's C ring contains multiple structures that appear to be density waves driven by time-variable anomalies in the planet's gravitational field. Semi-empirical extensions of density wave theory enable the observed wave properties to be…
The distinctive set of Saturnian small satellites, Aegaeon, Methone, Anthe, and Pallene, constitutes an excellent laboratory to understand the evolution of systems immersed in co-orbital dusty rings/arcs, subjected to perturbations from…
Recent studies of stellar occultations observed by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard the Cassini spacecraft have demonstrated that multiple spiral wave structures in Saturn's rings are probably generated by…
Saturns rings are known to show remarkable real time variability in their structure. Many of which can be associated to interactions with nearby moons and moonlets. Possibly the most interesting and dynamic place in the rings, probably in…