Mystery of Saturn’s Wonky B Ring: Solved

Universe Today wrote Mystery of Saturn’s Wonky B Ring: Solved.

"When the the Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, scientists saw that the outer edge of the planet‘s B ring was shaped like a rotating, flattened football by the gravitational perturbations of Mimas. But it was clear, even in Voyager’s findings, that the outer B ring’s behavior was far more complex than anything Mimas alone might do. Through the analysis of thousands of Cassini images of the B ring taken over a four-year period, Porco and her team have found the source of most of the complexity: at least three additional, independently rotating wave patterns, or oscillations, that distort the B ring’s edge....These oscillations, with one, two or three lobes, are not created by any moons. They have instead spontaneously arisen, in part because the ring is dense enough, and the B ring edge is sharp enough, for waves to grow on their own and then reflect at the edge."