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Circumplanetary Dust Populations

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Abstract

We summarize the current state of observations of circumplanetary dust populations, including both dilute and dense rings and tori around the giant planets, ejecta clouds engulfing airless moons, and rings around smaller planetary bodies throughout the Solar System. We also discuss the theoretical models that enable these observations to be understood in terms of the sources, sinks and transport of various dust populations. The dynamics and resulting transport of the particles can be quite complex, due to the fact that their motion is influenced by neutral and plasma drag, radiation pressure, and electromagnetic forces—all in addition to gravity. The relative importance of these forces depends on the environment, as well as the makeup and size of the particles. Possible dust sources include the generation of ejecta particles by impacts, active volcanoes and geysers, and the capture of exogenous particles. Possible dust sinks include collisions with moons, rings, or the central planet, erosion due to sublimation and sputtering, even ejection and escape from the circumplanetary environment.

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Notes

  1. Spherical shape of the grains is assumed, for simplicity.

  2. Both processes act as sources as well as sinks.

  3. These dynamical properties determine the mass of ejected material (yield).

  4. For triple point conditions of water and wall-collision lengths \(L_{Col} \approx 10^{-1}\mbox{ m}\) the critical radii take sub-micrometers (Schmidt et al. 2008).

  5. The salt is not fully dissolved in the water, leading to a small salt concentration in the vapor phase (Postberg et al. 2009).

  6. Jupiter radius \(R_{\mathrm{J}} = 71 492~\mbox{km}\).

  7. The velocity dispersion \(c^{2}\) is second central moment of the velocity distribution \(f (v)\), i.e. \(c\) could be considered as the averaged modulus of the thermal speed.

  8. Power-law size distributions \(n (s) \propto s^{-q}\) are often observed, but for slopes \(q > 2\) optical properties are dominated by the smallest particles, alternatively, narrow distributions, as the E ring dust, support this simplification.

  9. The index “0” is dropped in following because real dust rings are steadily sustained by sources so that the quantities \(n\) and \(\tau \) are assumed stationary!

  10. Saturn radius \(R_{\mathrm{S}} = 60268~\mbox{km}\).

  11. cylindrical coordinates (\(r,z\)) are used here.

  12. \(R_{\mathrm{J}}=71492~\mbox{km}\) is the equatorial radius of Jupiter.

  13. \(1~R_{\mathrm{U}}=25559~\mbox{km}\).

  14. Neptune’s radius \(R_{\mathrm{N}} = 24764~\mbox{km}\).

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Acknowledgements

We thank an anonymous referee for his considerable advise in making the paper more convincing. We acknowledge the support by the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission and by ISSI. The work of M. Seiß and M. Sachse has been funded by the DLR (German Space Agency) with the project (50OH1401).

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Correspondence to Frank Spahn.

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Cosmic Dust from the Laboratory to the Stars

Edited by Rafael Rodrigo, Jürgen Blum, Hsiang-Wen Hsu, Detlef Koschny, Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd, Jesús Martín-Pintado, Veerle Sterken and Andrew Westphal

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Spahn, F., Sachse, M., Seiß, M. et al. Circumplanetary Dust Populations. Space Sci Rev 215, 11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-018-0577-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-018-0577-3

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