(*) Gratefully acknowledging the authors of Fortran, Perl, Rotater, GraphicConverter, GifBuilder, and the mentoring-plus-early-code by Mihaly Horanyi of the Jovian dust streams dynamics and charging.

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Here are the xyz end points of 120,000 dust particles with 10 varying parameters, seen after 15 hours of traveling via a detailed physics simulation that tracks the particles' trajectories and charges. The dust particles were released, all at once, with Keplerian velocities from a ring source (1-360 degrees) just outside of Io's orbit and the plasma torus at 6.2 Jupiter radii, so this glimpse is what a release of dust of widely varying characteristics might look through the plasma torus.

Some particles do not escape, and remain bound in the Jovian system. These are shown orbiting in the inner region between 6.2 and 50 Jupiter radii away from Jupiter's center, and you can see them spanning the ecliptic plane of Io in the Jovian system. This inner region is the focus for the fly-through of this visualization, so that the viewer is dizzingly carried along through the warped cloud of dust from the outside to the inside.

See the visualization ! [Animated GIF, 3.7 MBytes]

The different colors represent different particle radius : "sz"

red: 5 <= sz <= 7 nanometers
green: 7 < sz <= 9 nanometers
blue: 9 < sz <= 12 nanometers
gold: 12 < sz <= 16 nanometers
purple: 16 < sz <= 20 nanometers
cyan (light blue): sz > 20 nanometers

From the left.

Over the top.

From the right -- flipped.

As in the collimated stream, the smallest particles (red, green) escape the Jovian magnetosphere quickly with speeds greater than 300 km/sec, and the largest particles in this simulation (purple, cyan) barely escape and move sluggishly with speeds on the order of 100 km/sec; you can see them positioned closest to those that are in bound orbits.

Zooming in, from the left.

From the right.

Notice the striation of the colors of the ejected particles in the cloud. This natural striation also appears in the collimated trail of dust from a point source. The balance of acting forces is the reason behind the warped effect of the cloud. This warp is often referred to by cosmic dust scientists as the 'dusty ballerina skirt' (e.g.: Horanyi, M. and Morfill, G. E. and Gruen, E., (1993), 'The dusty ballerina skirt of Jupiter, J. Geophys. Res. 98, 21,245--21,251)

Rolling over.

Zooming in, over the top.

Continuing to zoom in.

Moving in.

Face-on view.

Zooming in to the center.

The center. (Trapped in the Jovian system)

"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of
empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
 --Calvin (& Hobbes)

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Graps Home

Cosmic Dust Group Home

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Created by Amara Graps.
Last Modified by Amara Graps on February 3, 2003.