title: Clump detections and limits on moons in Jupiter's ring system.
abstract: The dusty jovian ring system must be replenished continuously from embedded source bodies. The New Horizons spacecraft has performed a comprehensive search for kilometer-sized moons within the system, which might have revealed the larger members of this population. No new moons were found, however, indicating a sharp cutoff in the population of jovian bodies smaller than 8-kilometer-radius Adrastea. However, the search revealed two families of clumps in the main ring: one close pair and one cluster of three to five. All orbit within a brighter ringlet just interior to Adrastea. Their properties are very different from those of the few other clumpy rings known; the origin and nonrandom distribution of these features remain unexplained, but resonant confinement by Metis may play a role.
authors.affiliation: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. mshowalter@seti.org
authors.forename: Mark R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Showalter
authors.forename: Andrew F
authors.initials: AF
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.forename: Harold A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Weaver
authors.forename: S Alan
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Stern
authors.forename: John R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Spencer
authors.forename: Henry B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Throop
authors.forename: Emma M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Birath
authors.forename: Debi
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rose
authors.forename: Jeffrey M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Moore