Clump detections and limits on moons in Jupiter's ring system.
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.
Showalter
Mark R
MR
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. mshowalter@seti.org
Cheng
Andrew F
AF
Weaver
Harold A
HA
Stern
S Alan
SA
Spencer
John R
JR
Throop
Henry B
HB
Birath
Emma M
EM
Rose
Debi
D
Moore
Jeffrey M
JM