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Description
The appearance of debris disks around distant stars depends upon the scattering/phase function (SPF) of the material in the disk. However, characterizing the SPFs of these extrasolar debris disks is challenging because only a limited range of scattering angles are visible to Earth-based observers. By contrast, Saturn's tenuous rings can be observed over a much broader range of geometries, so their SPFs can be much better constrained. Since these rings are composed of small particles released from the surfaces of larger bodies, they are reasonable analogs to debris disks and so their SPFs can provide insights into the plausible scattering properties of debris disks. This work examines two of Saturn's dusty rings: the G ring (at 167500km from Saturn's center) and the D68 ringlet (at 67600km). Using data from the cameras on board the Cassini spacecraft, we are able to estimate the rings' brightnesses at scattering angles ranging from 170{deg} to 0.5{deg}. We find that both of the rings exhibit extremely strong forward-scattering peaks, but for scattering angles above 60{deg} their brightnesses are nearly constant. These SPFs can be well approximated by a linear combination of three Henyey-Greenstein functions, and are roughly consistent with the SPFs of irregular particles from laboratory measurements. Comparing these data to Fraunhofer and Mie models highlights several challenges involved in extracting information about particle compositions and size distributions from SPFs alone. The SPFs of these rings also indicate that the degree of forward scattering in debris disks may be greatly underestimated.
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