STUDY OF SATURN ELECTROSTATIC DISCHARGES IN A WIDE RANGE OF TIME SCALES

Abstract

Saturn Electrostatic discharges (SED) are sporadic broadband impulsive radio bursts associated with lightning in Saturnian atmosphere. After 25 years of space investigations in 2006 the first successful observations of SED on the UTR-2 radio telescope were carried out [1]. Since2007 along-term program of ED search and study in the Solar system has started. As a part of this program the unique observations with high time resolution were taken in 2010. New possibilities of UTR-2 radio telescope allowed to provide a long-period observations and study with high temporal resolution. This article presents the results of SED study in a wide range of time scales: from seconds to mi­croseconds. For the first time there were obtained a low frequency spectrum of SED. We calculated flux densities of individual bursts at the maximum achievable time resolu­tion. Flux densities of most intensive bursts reach 4200 Jy.