Many of the significant questions surrounding Saturn's rings relate to their origins. When did they form? How did they form? Where did the material they formed from come from? Most scenarios for forming Saturn's rings involve the disruption of a small moon and inevitably the material is not all water ice. Likely there are going to be some silicates involved as well. However, when we look at the rings of Saturn what we see is mostly water ice with the fraction of contaminants being small but varying with location in the rings.
This page shows work we are doing to look at how silicate material would behaved in Saturn's rings were it mixed in with the icy particles. This work is still in the early stages, but the general idea is to do simulations that use small particles with a certain percentage of them set to a density for silicates while the others have the density of porous ice.
The animations and stills linked to in the table below show four panels. The top left panel draws all the particles to their proper size. The silicate particles are drawn in red. One of the things we are interested in is how much of the time the silicate particles are obscured by the water ice particles. If you don't see much red, that means that observations would not be seeing the silicates. The top right panels shows the silicate bodies drawn on top of the icy bodies so that you can see where they really are relative to the icy particles. The panel on the bottom left draws only the silicate particles. The bottom right panel shows relative fraction of silicate particles. With cells are at the average fraction for the simulation. Solid blue has no silicates. Solid green has the silicate level enhanced by a factor of two while solid red is enhanced by a factor of ten.
It appears that the silicate particles group together and form cores that are longer lived than the standard ephimeral gravity wakes. It isn't yet clear how stable these cores can be. One thing that is clear is that the silicate material is well hidden most of the time.
| Location | Fraction Silicates | Particle Diameter | Particle Densities | Surface Density | Geometric Optical Depth | Image | Movie |
| A ring, 130,000 km | 4% | 0.52 m | 0.5 / 3 g/cm^3 | 30 g/cm^2 | 1.7 | image | Mplayer Movie |
| A ring, 130,000 km | 4% | 0.156-1.56 m | 0.5 / 3 g/cm^3 | 30 g/cm^2 | 1.36 | image | Mplayer Movie |
