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Article Dans Une Revue Nature Année : 2008

The determination of the structure of Saturn's F ring by nearby moonlets

Résumé

Saturn's narrow F ring exhibits several unusual features that vary on timescales of hours to years. These include transient clumps, a central core surrounded by a multistranded structure and a regular series of longitudinal channels associated with Prometheus, one of the ring's two 'shepherding' satellites. Several smaller moonlets and clumps have been detected in the ring's immediate vicinity, and a population of embedded objects has been inferred. Here we report direct evidence of moonlets embedded in the ring's bright core, and show that most of the F ring's morphology results from the continual gravitational and collisional effects of small satellites, often combined with the perturbing effect of Prometheus. The F-ring region is perhaps the only location in the Solar System where large-scale collisional processes are occurring on an almost daily basis.
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Dates et versions

cea-00930885 , version 1 (24-09-2019)

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Carl D. Murray, Kevin Beurle, Nicholas J. Cooper, Michael W. Evans, Gareth Williams, et al.. The determination of the structure of Saturn's F ring by nearby moonlets. Nature, 2008, 453 (7196), pp.739-744. ⟨10.1038/nature06999⟩. ⟨cea-00930885⟩
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