Saturn rings: fractal structure and random field model

Abstract

This study is motivated by the observation, based on photographs from the Cassini mission, that Saturn's rings have a fractal structure in radial direction. Accordingly, two questions are considered: (1) What Newtonian mechanics argument in support of that fractal structure is possible? (2) What kinematics model of such fractal rings can be formulated? Both challenges are based on taking Saturn's rings' spatial structure as being statistically stationarity in time and statistically isotropic in space, but statistically nonstationary in space. An answer to the first challenge is given through the calculus in non-integer dimensional spaces and basic mechanics arguments (Tarasov (2006) Celest. Mech. Dyn. Astron. 94). The second issue is approached in Section 3 by taking the random field of angular velocity vector of a rotating particle of the ring as a random section of a special vector bundle. Using the theory of group representations, we prove that such a field is completely determined by a sequence of continuous positive-definite matrix-valued functions defined on the Cartesian square F 2 of the radial cross-section F of the rings, where F is a fat fractal.