CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Saturn?s dense rings are, by their dimensions and distance to Earth, the most accessible dynamical laboratory, exemplifying the physics of particle disks in the Universe. The system consist of icy particles ranging in size from a few centimeters up to several meters. Furthermore, larger bodies exist in the rings with sizes of tens of meters up to kilometers. The Cassini mission brought data in unprecedented detail monitoring the structure and properties of this ring system. The dynamics of an unperturbed planetary ring consisting of macroscopic particles is basically determined by inelastic binary particle collisions and the shearing motion in the gravitational field of the central planet. Furthermore, ring self-gravity and the gravitational interaction with Saturn?s moons, exterior to or embedded in the rings, are important for the dynamics and the formation of structures in the rings. We adapted an open source N-body code (Rebound) in order to study the effect of the oblateness of Saturn in the structures that appear in the rings. We found that additional excitation of ring particles at the edge of HorseShoe region, around a moonlet that opened a gap, can explain some features observed in Cassini images.