Evidence for a recent collision in saturn's irregular moon population

Abstract

Using CFHT imaging data, we searched a 1.1 deg2 field on each side of Saturn down to magnitude mw ; 26.3, corresponding to diameters of D ; 3 km. We detected 120 objects, which were comoving with Saturn and are nearly certainly irregular moons. For example, all but one of our detections brighter than magnitude 25.5 link to known Saturnian irregulars, with 40 linkages that thus extend the orbital arc of previous discoveries. Extrapolating our sample's characterized detections (those for which we can debias the search) to the entire Saturnian irregular population, we estimate that there are 150 ± 30 moons down to D = 2.8 km, which is approximately three times as many irregular moons as Jupiter down to the same size. At the smallest sizes, from D = 3.8 down to 2.8 km, we find that the Saturnian irregular population exhibits a steep size distribution of the differential power-law index = - q 4.9+0.6 0.7. We believe this steep size distribution is the signature of a relatively recent (few hundred Myr ago) collisional event in Saturn's retrograde irregular population.