Progress in the study of dusty plasmas

While the study of dust–plasma interactions is by no means new, early progress in the field was slow and uneven. It received a major boost in the early 1980s with the Voyager spacecraft observations of peculiar features in the Saturnian ring system (e.g. the `radial spokes') which could not be explained by gravitation alone and led to the development of the gravito-electrodynamic theory of dust dynamics. This theory scored another major success more recently in providing the only possible explanation of collimated high-speed beams of fine dust particles observed to sporadically emanate from Jupiter by the Ulysses and Galileo spacecrafts.