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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.
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
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.
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
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This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
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
There's a very interesting article at space.com entitled 'What is a Moon?'.