The dust halo of Saturn's main rings

土星主环的尘埃晕

• 批准号: 330226508
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Frank Spahn, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Physik und Astronomie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2016-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/330226508?language=en
• 关键词: dust; halo; Saturn; main; rings

The outstanding Cassini mission and especially its grand finale provided an astonishing new insight to the processes taking place in Saturn’s magnificent rings, which are the closest representatives of the vast family of cosmic disks and may be seen as cosmic laboratories. Yet, their age is still unknown and subject of ongoing discussions.Based on our work during the original project, we plan to utilize measurements of so called “ring rain” particles, as they have been seen during the final phase of the Cassini mission, as a gauging for an analytical erosion model to determine the rings’ mass loss over time. We include a stochastic model, that has been newly derived during the preceding project phase, together with a deterministic description of the effective potential for nanodust particles. This combined approach describes the motion of a particle in Saturn’s magnetic and gravitational fields that is subject to continued stochastic charging. As a consequence, the particle’s energy is slowly increased and the formerly spatially bound motion can become unbound – freeing the particle to enter the ring rain.We apply this model to achieve new information on the impact-ejecta erosion of Saturn’s rings which also limits their livetime.

杰出的卡西尼号任务，特别是它的最终结局，为土星壮丽的环提供了一个惊人的新视角，它是浩瀚的宇宙盘家族中最接近的代表，可以被视为宇宙实验室。然而，它们的年龄仍然是未知的，而且还在继续讨论。基于我们在最初项目中的工作，我们计划利用对卡西尼号任务最后阶段所看到的所谓“环雨”粒子的测量，作为分析侵蚀模型的量度，以确定环随时间的质量损失。我们包括一个随机模型，这是在前一个项目阶段新得出的，以及对纳米尘埃粒子有效势的确定性描述。这一组合方法描述了粒子在土星磁场和引力场中的运动，该运动受到持续随机充电的影响。结果，粒子的能量慢慢增加，以前受空间约束的运动可以变得不受约束--释放粒子进入环雨。我们应用这个模型来获得关于土星环的撞击-喷发侵蚀的新信息，这也限制了它们的寿命。