The Smallest Particles in Saturn's A and C Rings

Radio occultations of Saturn's main rings by spacecraft suggest a power law particle size-distribution down to sizes of the order of 1 cm (Marouf et al., 1983), (Zebker et al., 1985). The lack of optical depth variations between ultraviolet and near-IR wavelengths indicate a lack of micron-sized particles. Between these two regimes, the particle-size distribution is largely unknown. A cutoff where the particle-size distribution turns over must exist, but the position and shape of it is not clear from existing studies. Using a series of solar occultations performed by the VIMS instrument on-board Cassini in the near-infrared, we are able to measure light forward scattered by particles in the A and C rings. With a model of diffraction by ring particles, and the previous radio work as a constraint on the slope of the particle size distribution, we estimate the minimum particle size using a truncated power-law size distribution. The C Ring shows a minimum particle size of $4.1^{+3.8}_{-1.3}$ mm, with an assumed power law index of q=3.1 and a maximum particle size of 10 m. The A Ring signal shows a similar level of scattered flux, but modeling is complicated by the presence of self-gravity wakes and higher optical depths. If q<3, our A Ring model requires a minimum particle size below one millimeter (< 0.34 mm for an assumed q=2.75, or $0.56^{+0.35}_{-0.16}$ mm for a steeper q=2.9) to be consistent with VIMS observations. These results might seem to contradict previous optical(Dones et al., 1993) and infrared (French and Nicholson, 2000) work, which implied that there were few particles in the A Ring smaller than 1 cm. But, because of the shallow power law, relatively little optical depth (between 0.03 and 0.16 in extinction, or 0.015 - 0.08 in absorption) is provided by these particles.Comment: 47 pages, 16 figures, 3 Table

Tidal friction in early-type stars

The tidal torque on an early-type star is concentrated near the boundary between the convective core and radiative envelope and a train of gravity waves is excited there. The angular momentum which the torque removes from the fluid is transported outward by the gravity waves, which carry negative angular momentum. Before the surface layers are despun to synchronous rotation, the gravity waves propagate to just below the photosphere where they suffer radiative damping and are partially reflected. It is here that the negative angular momentum is deposited and the primary tidal despinning takes place. The surface layers cannot be spun down below synchronous rotation because as a train of gravity waves approaches a corotation resonance its group velocity and wavelength tend to zero, its amplitude diverges, and it is completely absorbed. Thus, tidal despinning to synchronous rotation proceeds from the outside toward the inside of the star. Our picture provides a neat explanation for the otherwise puzzling discovery by Giuricin, Mardirossian, and Mezzetti that Zahn's theory for tidal evolution in early-type close binaries seems to be compatible with the observed rates of orbit circularization while significantly underestimating the observed rates of spin synchronization

Tides in rotating fluids

We consider the tidal disturbance forced in a differentially rotating fluid by a rigidly rotating external potential. The fluid is assumed to be inviscid, insulated, and self-gravitating, and to have laminar unperturbed and perturbed velocity fields. The external potential may exert a steady torque on the fluid which is of second order in Its strength. However, to this order, we prove that there are no secular changes in the angular momenta of fluid particles, except possibly at corotation where the angular velocity, Ω(r,θ), is equal to the pattern speed of the potential, Ω_p. A corollary of our theorem is that, except at corotation, all of the angular momentum transferred to the fluid by the external potential must be transported away by internal stresses. In the applications of which we are aware, these stresses are associated with waves

High Angular Resolution Stellar Imaging with Occultations from the Cassini Spacecraft II: Kronocyclic Tomography

We present an advance in the use of Cassini observations of stellar occultations by the rings of Saturn for stellar studies. Stewart et al. (2013) demonstrated the potential use of such observations for measuring stellar angular diameters. Here, we use these same observations, and tomographic imaging reconstruction techniques, to produce two dimensional images of complex stellar systems. We detail the determination of the basic observational reference frame. A technique for recovering model-independent brightness profiles for data from each occulting edge is discussed, along with the tomographic combination of these profiles to build an image of the source star. Finally we demonstrate the technique with recovered images of the {\alpha} Centauri binary system and the circumstellar environment of the evolved late-type giant star, Mira.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Accepted by MNRA

Pencil-Beam Surveys for Faint Trans-Neptunian Objects

We have conducted pencil-beam searches for outer solar system objects to a limiting magnitude of R ~ 26. Five new trans-neptunian objects were detected in these searches. Our combined data set provides an estimate of ~90 trans-neptunian objects per square degree brighter than ~ 25.9. This estimate is a factor of 3 above the expected number of objects based on an extrapolation of previous surveys with brighter limits, and appears consistent with the hypothesis of a single power-law luminosity function for the entire trans-neptunian region. Maximum likelihood fits to all self-consistent published surveys with published efficiency functions predicts a cumulative sky density Sigma(<R) obeying log10(Sigma) = 0.76(R-23.4) objects per square degree brighter than a given magnitude R.Comment: Accepted by AJ, 18 pages, including 6 figure