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New Ring Discovered Around Saturn
HunahpuMonkey writes "BBC News is reporting that 'scientists using the Cassini probe have found a new ring and one, possibly two, new objects orbiting Saturn.' The article also notes that the discoveries are in the planet's contorted F-ring region. The ring of new material seems to be associated with Saturn's moon Atlas."
There's a good article here about what exactly makes up a moon. I can tell you its not about gravity since basically every object with mass has gravity.
argh! EVERYthing with mass has its own gravitational field. fuckingdictionaryit
EVERYTHING has it's own gravitational field. You do, I do, your computer does; the phosphors on my screen displaying this text as I type it each have their own gravitational field.
That being said, I'm pretty sure any body which naturally has a regular orbit around a planet is considered a moon, though you must get into a size limit somewhere otherwise every speck of dust in Saturn's rings could be considerd a separate "moon".
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"satellite" means orbiting a planet.
"moon" means natural satellite.
"Moon" means Earth's moon.
Being associated with Atlas doesn't mean that they were described as moons. But I think they do qualify under the scientific definition.
indeed. Take as another kind of example a geostationary satellite which appears to be over the same point, somewhere along the equator is good. :)
Is it moving, yes. Its orbiting, it just happens to be orbiting at the right distance such that its period is the same as the earths rotation. Ask your coworker about that one
Theorists have posited the existance of small moons (~5 km) inside the F ring for some time. They could explain the odd look and behavior of the F ring, although they are not the only possibility. If these new objects are moons and not temporarly clumps of ring material, it will be interesting to see how the models and data agree (or don't agree).
Note that after 2 such twists, his arms may no longer be twisted!
Try it with a cup full of water, holding the handle outward. Turn it clockwise, once over your arm, and the second time under your elbow (keeping it upright the whole time). Interestingly and amazingly, the cup stays upright, and watching the handle makes two full 360% turns; yet your arm isn't twisted!
(a girl that danced in a SF nightclub with flaming batons taught me this technique and explained 'spin 1/2' particles to me - which have the same property of being different when rotated 360degrees but the same when rotated 720degrees))
Try it with a cup full of water, holding the handle outward. Turn it clockwise, once over your arm, and the second time under your elbow (keeping it upright the whole time). Interestingly and amazingly, the cup stays upright, and watching the handle makes two full 360% turns; yet your arm isn't twisted!
uh, yeah, but that's still spinning.
And you're assuming that the person isn't sitting down and can get their torso up and around the object. And the 720 degree full spin is just because of additional spatial dimensions which the object has to turn through. The 3-space representation of the object is just a projection of its higher dimensional self. Ofcourse this can be argued to exist as pure conceptual metaphor since spin-space can be argued to not actually exist... ofcourse the definition of actually is open for debate.
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Technically, the Earth's moon is called "Luna". People just call it "the moon" because that's the particular solar system planetary satellite you're probably referring to (as opposed to another planet's satellite). It's just laziness really.
Deimos is spelled correctly in your post btw.
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