Modeling Saturn’s D68 Clumps as a Co-orbital Satellite System

Abstract

Abstract The D68 ringlet is the innermost feature in Saturn’s rings. Four clumps that appeared in D68 around 2014 remained evenly spaced about 30° apart and moved very slowly relative to each other from 2014 up until the last measurements were taken in 2017. D68's narrowness and the distribution of clumps could either indicate that we have a collection of source bodies in a co-orbital configuration or imply that an outside force confines the observed dust and any source bodies. In this paper we explore the possibility that these four clumps arose from four source bodies in a co-orbital configuration. We find that there are no solutions with four masses that produce the observed spacings. We therefore consider whether an unseen fifth co-orbital object could account for the discrepancies in the angular separations and approach a stable stationary configuration. We find a range of solutions for five co-orbital objects where their mass ratios depend on the assumed location of the fifth mass. Numerical simulations of five co-orbitals are highly sensitive to initial conditions, especially for the range of masses we would expect the D68 clumps to have. The fragility of our D68 co-orbital system model implies that there is probably some outside force confining the material in this ringlet.