Vertical relaxation of a moonlet propeller in Saturn's a ring
- Two images, taken by the Cassini spacecraft near Saturn's equinox in 2009 August, show the Earhart propeller casting a 350 km long shadow, offering the opportunity to watch how the ring height, excited by the propeller moonlet, relaxes to an equilibrium state. From the shape of the shadow cast and a model of the azimuthal propeller height relaxation, we determine the exponential cooling constant of this process to be lambda = 0.07 +/- 0.02 km(-1), and thereby determine the collision frequency of the ring particles in the vertically excited region of the propeller to be omega(c)/Omega = 0.9 +/- 0.2.
| Author details: | H. Hoffmann, Martin SeißORCiDGND, Frank SpahnORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/765/1/L4 |
| ISSN: | 2041-8205 |
| Title of parent work (English): | The astrophysical journal : an international review of spectroscopy and astronomical physics ; Part 2, Letters |
| Publisher: | IOP Publ. Ltd. |
| Place of publishing: | Bristol |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2013 |
| Publication year: | 2013 |
| Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
| Tag: | planets and satellites: individual (Saturn); planets and satellites: rings |
| Volume: | 765 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Number of pages: | 3 |
| Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Sp 384/24-1, Sp 384/25-1] |
| Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Physik und Astronomie |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
