On dust emissions from the jovian system

Abstract

As described by Grun et al. the dust impact detector on the Ulysses spacecraft detected a totally unexpected series of dust streams in the outer solar system near the orbit of Jupiter. Five considerations lead us to believe that the dust streams emanate from the jovian system itself: (1) the dust streams only occur within about 1 AU of the jovian system, with the strongest stream being the one closest to Jupiter (about 550 R(sub J) away); (2) the direction from which they arrive is never far from the line-of-sight direction to Jupiter; (3) the time period between streams is about 28 (plus or minus 3) days; (4) the impact velocities are very high - mostly around 40 km s(exp -1); and (5) we can think of no cometary, asteroidal, or interstellar source that could give rise to the above four phenomena; such streams have never before been detected.