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Two New Saturnian Moons
Mixel writes "NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting saturn since the 30th of June has uncovered two previously unknown bodies. 'The moons are approximately 3 kilometers (2 miles) and 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) across -- smaller than the city of Boulder, Colorado.' The Huygens probe will be deployed to the large (bigger than Mercury!) yet mysterious moon, Titan, in December."
Thats no moon...
sorry, sorry... I'll get my quote, I mean coat.
Saturn actually has millions of moons if you count the boulders in the rings. If you don't count them, then where is the cut-off point? This debate has never been settled, and may require an arbitrary cut-off size to get a clean definition.
Table-ized A.I.
Not quite. It's very likely a good jump or powerful stride would send you flying off into space, as a moon of that size would likely have a very low gravity.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Why must everything be compared to Boulder, Colorado?
Where do we draw the line between classifying a stellar body as a moon or an asteroid? Do we simply base it on the fact that it's a piece of rock orbiting a planet or is there some other defining characteristic?
Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system, has a diameter ~950 Km in length, much larger than many of the so-called moons we've discovered.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
...but bigger than Little Rock?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'd say it's a moon when it's big enough to exert enough gravity to walk on, without worrying about being flung out into space.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
It seems like one (S/2004 S1) of the little worldlets may have been re-discovered since it may have been spotted when one of the Voyager probes passed Jupiter by in 1981, then christened S/1981 S14.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
A satellite is any object that orbits a planet, regardless of mass.
A moon is any natural object that orbits a planet, again regardless of mass. (so probes and debris don't qualify)
A planet is an object massive enough to become spherical under its own gravitationnal field, that orbits a star. An asteroid is any rocky object that orbits a star and doesn't qualify as a planet.
A moon doesn't have to be spherical, so that's why the two irregular moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos (captured asteroids), are still called moons. The rings of saturn are made up of millions of small "moons", but they are (rightfully so) considered a single entity.
1) I have to muse, when did Boulder CO become a unit of astronomical significance (and for the trolls: how many library of congress is that?)
2) Everybody keeps asking, but the reason these are significant is because
a) they orbit saturn (most asteroids orbit the sun)
b) they differ from the asteroids in the asteroid belt because, well, they are not in the asteroid belt
c) their orbit are actually located between two other moons, which is surprising because such area is under heavy bombarbment from other sun-orbiting asteroids and they should have been destroyed long time ago - this sheds light on our understanding of the kuniper belt, asteroids, saturnic satellite formation, etc etc.
That said, I couldn't make out the things on the picture, so i dunno... could be CCD noise? that would badly suck...
Extra! Extra! Scientists find two tiny rocks millions of miles away! Many surprised they haven't been seen before now!
An artists sketch of the new moons as seen from Earth through a high-powered telescope is shown here
:
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
Even though they're orbiting Saturn, they're closer to Earth than Boulder, Colorado is.
And by the way, we don't call them "moons" here in Boulder. We refer to them as "planetary companions."
FYI: Boulder is where Mork and Mindy was set.
They are provisionally named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2.
Why? Just call them Boulder and Little Rock. But then again, maybe not. Some lawyer might sue. Do cities trademark their names?
Is this guy onto something big, or is he delusional?
If you read more than a few paragraphs of Hoagland's work, it becomes pretty obvious that the latter is the case.
Hoagland is the one who is still obsessed with the "face on Mars," interprets JPEG image artifacts as proof of aliens, and so on.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I think the citizens of Boulder will still fit if they squeeze together a bit.
MAKE YOUR TIME
If we throw a trashbag out of the the ISS does that become a moon?
Science has no place for litterbugs! Shame on you!
There's a very interesting article at space.com entitled 'What is a Moon?'.
Actually, what struck me about the sizes quoted, is that Boulder Colorado must be really small. I do a three km walk every day. I always pictured it as a big city, but you could walk from one end to the other in an hour, hour and a half. That's not a city, that's a town.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Ask Phil Plait.
karma capped
Even the most beautiful moon still doesn't compare to the wonders of Uranus.
G-Force music visualization
I have read a great deal of his stuff, and his critics too. I am not talking about his THEORIES though, I am talking about his OBSERVATIONS, specifically concerning the planets in the solar system.
I checked into a few of his planetary findings (including Saturn's now missing ring spokes), and they checked out as advertised. Mars' ice caps are dissapearing rapidly, and had a 3 month long global dust storm a few years back. Solar activity is insane.. more sunspots in the last 40 years than the previous 1150. There's stuff like this described for every single planet. I haven't checked them ALL out myself yet, but the claims have been disturbingly true so far...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
we now have a third metric to add to the existing system of measuring everything in pop news stories in "volkswagens" and "rhodeislands" (1), we can now hit that middle mark, "boulders", though it's not so middle...
the conversions for the VBR go something like this (2):
beetle ('classic' at 160" x 60" = 9,600 sq in = 66.67 sq ft footprint
boulder = 25 sq mi = 696,960,000 sq ft
rhode island = 1,214 sq mi = 33,844,377,600 sq ft
which means
10,453,877 beetles in a boulder
48.56 boulders in a rhodeisland
507,640,282 beetles in a rhodeisland
which would make a hellova traffic jam (3)
(1) also haven't read the journals of irrepreoducible results / AIR for a while so this could all seem cribbed - sorry if so
(2) (check my math, it's early still)
(3) virtually no change to downtown newport in the summer however
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If any unmodified* human, can achieve escape veolocity under it's own power**, then it's not a moon.
;)
African or European?
Now feel free to mod me down
Pavlov. Does this name ring a bell?