Jupiter's rings

Jupiter's ring system is extremely tenuous and composed mainly of small particles ejected from the surface of small source moons after high velocity impacts. These small particles are highly susceptible to non-gravitational forces allowing their orbits to evolve under Poynting-Robertson drag and electromagnetic forcing in Jupiter's extreme magnetospheric environment. The figure to the left shows how the outer radial extent of each ring is located near one of Jupiter's small inner moons, who likely resupply the rings which would otherwise rapidly diminish. As material spiral inwards to the strong 3:2 Lorentz resonance with the rotation of Jupiter's non-axisymmetric magnetic field they encounter its strong vertical forcing creating the doughnut-shaped Halo ring torus.

I am analyzing images taken during New Horizon's Jupiter flyby in 2007 that capture the main ring of Jupiter. By looking for azimuthal brightness variations in the main ring I hope to find a connection between structures located at the 3:2 Lindblad resonance and large storms in Jupiter's atmosphere which also rotate around the planet near the magnetic field rotation rate. This work will be a good comparative study to gravity data from Juno, which may also contain the mass of Jupiter's large storms.

Left: Rings of Jupiter diagram. Right: Sample image of Jupiter's main ring from New Horizons (image 34742163).

Above: Jupiter rings diagram showing the locations of first order resonances with Jupiter's rotation.

Above: Radial profiles of Jupiter's main ring from low and high phase angles. In the low phase profile we can see that the drop in reflectance occurs at the horizontal component of the 3:2 Lorentz resonance with Jupiter's magnetic field.