New Jovian ring?

We follow the orbital evolution of small dust particles generated from the break up of comet Shoemaker‐Levy 9. In addition to the usual perturbations, we also consider electrostatic charging and the consequent magnetospheric effects. We show, that in about ten years following the break up, a small fraction of the dust will settle into orbits well inside the magnetosphere. The forming ring will be comprised of dust particles with radii in the range of 1.5 < a < 2.5 µm that follow retrograde orbits in the radial range of 4.5 < r < 6 R J . We estimate the peak optical depth of this new ring in the range of 10 −8 < τ max < 2 × 10 −6 .