Hamilton, D.P. and J.A. Burns 1993. Ejection of dust from Jupiter's gossamer ring. Nature 364, 695-699.


One of the most remarkable discoveries of the Ulysses spacecraft to date has been the detection of periodic, hypervelocity, collimated streams of tiny dust particles emanating from Jupiter; in all, at least six distinct events were identified (Fig.~1)\Grunc\and\Grund. Horanyi \etal recently showed that electromagnetic forces can eject positively charged dust from Jupiter's magnetosphere and suggested an Io source\Horanyia; we argue here that the mass and velocity ranges of detected particles are more consistent with a source in Jupiter's gossamer ring. After exiting the jovian magnetosphere, particles are further accelerated by the interplanetary magnetic field, the time history of which primarily determines which particles will reach the spacecraft. Our model of the interplanetary acceleration predicts three features present in the Ulysses data: fewer streams before closest approach than after, a periodicity of approximately 28 days resulting from changes in the solar wind, and, perhaps most interestingly, an extremely intense stream immediately after closest approach.
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