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| Saturn's F ring is a fascinating example of a narrow eccentric ring that displays a rich dynamical
structure: besides its non-zero eccentricity and sharp-edges, it has multiple components entangled in a complicated way which shows a variety of short-time features. The two shepherd moons, Prometheus and Pandora, influence importantly many of the short-time dynamical features observed. Yet, the location of the ring predicted by the shepherd theory does not correspond to the ring locationl. The confinement of Saturn's F-ring thus remains unexplained.
In this talk, using a scattering approach, I shall present numerical results based on accurate long-time integrations on a realistic 5-body model for the occurrence and location of Saturn's F ring. Test particles that remain trapped and display some stability properties form a narrow elliptic ring displaying sharp edges. Comparison of our results with the observations is provided. |
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