相关论文: Saturn's Rings are Fractal

We present a review of Saturn's interior structure and thermal evolution, with a particular focus on work in the past 5 years. Data from the Cassini mission, including a precise determination of the gravity field from the Grand Finale…

The Phoebe ring, Saturn's largest and faintest ring, lies far beyond the planet's well-known main rings. It is primarily sourced by collisions with Saturn's largest irregular satellite Phoebe, perhaps through stochastic macroscopic…

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…

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,…

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…

At the end of the Cassini mission, Saturn's rings have been claimed to be spectacularly young compared to the age of the Solar System: their unusual ice-rich composition corresponds to initially pure ice rings polluted by interplanetary…

We present a photometric model of the rings of Saturn which includes the main rings and an F ring, inclined to the main rings, with a Gaussian vertical profile of optical depth. This model reproduces the asymmetry in brightness between the…

Images obtained by the Cassini spacecraft between 2012 and 2015 reveal a periodic brightness variation in a region of Saturn's D ring that previously appeared to be rather featureless. Furthermore, the intensity and radial wavenumber of…

Saturn's F ring is subject to dynamic structural changes over short periods. Among the observed phenomena are diffuse extended bright clumps (ECs) ~ 3-40 degrees in longitudinal extent. These ECs appear, evolve, and disappear over a span of…

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…

Over the last eight years, the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard the Cassini orbiter has returned hyperspectral images in the 0.35-5.1 micron range of the icy satellites and rings of Saturn. These very different objects…

A multi-decade record of ground-based mid-infrared (7-25 $\mu$m) images of Saturn is used to explore seasonal and non-seasonal variability in thermal emission over more than a Saturnian year (1984-2022). Thermal emission measured by 3-m and…

In a previous paper (Hedman and Nicholson 2013), we developed tools that allowed us to confirm that several of the waves in Saturn's rings were likely generated by resonances with fundamental sectoral normal modes inside Saturn itself. Here…

Spokes are localized clouds of fine particles that appear over the outer part of Saturn's B ring. Over the course of the Cassini Mission, the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) obtained over 20,000 images of the outer B ring, providing the…

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 predict how a remote observer would see the brightness variations of giant planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn as they orbit their central stars. We model the geometry of Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn's rings for varying orbital and…

We have analyzed the highest-quality images to be obtained by Cassini of Saturn's main rings after the Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) and before the Ring Grazing Orbits (RGO) and Grand Finale (GF). These images are comparable to those of SOI…

Radio occultations of Saturn's main rings by spacecraft suggest a power law particle size-distribution down to sizes of the order of 1 cm (Marouf et al., 1983), (Zebker et al., 1985). The lack of optical depth variations between ultraviolet…

The thermal inertia values of Saturn's main rings (the A, B, and C rings and the Cassini division) are derived by applying our thermal model to azimuthally scanned spectra taken by the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). Model…

The accurate determination of Saturn's gravitational coefficients by Cassini could provide tighter constrains on Saturn's internal structure. Also, occultation measurements provide important information on the planetary shape which is often…