The sculpting of Jupiter’s gossamer rings by its shadow

Jupiter has a main ring, an inner halo, and two fainter and more distant gossamer rings. Most of these structures are constrained by the orbits of the moons, but a faint outward protrusion called the Thebe extension behaves differently and has eluded understanding. Douglas Hamilton and Harald Krüger now report observations of dust in the outer ring region (recorded as impacts on the Galileo spacecraft) and modelling studies that point to Jupiter's shadow as the agent that sculpts the gossamer rings and creates the mysterious Thebe extension.