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Saturn's Moon Iapetus Has A 'Belt'
Believe writes "In another unexpected find by Cassini-Huygens, Saturn's moon Iapetus shows a bulging waistline. According to the story, the dark side of the moon is almost perfectly bisected by a tall, narrow ridge that runs for 1300 km (808 mi) and rises up to 20 km (12 mi) high. This height is amazing in such a small moon; it rivals Olympus Mons on Mars which is a body 5 times its size."
...but you don't see it on the front page of Slashdot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's no moon.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
This cant be coincidence..
That makes two 'deathstar' moons around saturn then. ;)
Wheres the Rebel alliance when you need it
Looks like a walnut to me.
Must mean that humans were created from space aliens and the egyptians were actually a space fairing race.
I think it is the remains of the ancient circum-Iapetus particle accelerator.
Ahhhahahah! hahahaha! hahahaha...ooooo, just shoot me now.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Oh my, thousands of nerds will come out and rejoyce over this pic.
Screw science tag; it's Star Wars, baby!
[Literally, I expect to see little scientific discourse on this thread...so sad.]
o_O.
:O
It's a giant space WALNUT.
One remaining option is impact by a large asteroid. We now have to come up with a reasonable impact scenario that can produce a feature similar to the one seen on Iapetus, which is indeed very strange.
Easy: two big asteroids struck the moon simultaneously on both poles!
It cost me $1 to buy a cheeseburger this afternoon, and to my knowledge no person was killed in the process. So I guess with your logic, the government should spend billions on cheeseburgers. Well, I wouldn't mind.
And that is definitely a parting line, just an artifact of the mold.
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
..like a Russian Doll, open it up & there's another moon inside!
This is a remnant from the Iapetusian Cold War, when the folk from the northern hemisphere were separated from those in the southern.
Be grateful that Cassini-Huygens' lens isn't more powerful or you might have been able to make out David Hasselhoff standing on it singing a song about freedom.
Looks like Bugs Bunny definitely took a wrong turn at Albuquerque...
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Oh come on. Give it a break. It was built a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It has a lot of miles and a lot of years on it. I think it looks good for its age.
When 4 billion years you become, look as good you will not.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
a giant mold line.
Since we're all wildly speculating anyway.
... Great Wall of Iapetus imaged by Western surveillance satellite.
Film at 11
I, for one, welcome our new giant, spacefaring squirrel overlords.
-What have you contributed lately?
10. The moon was actually injection-molded.
9. The hill is the remains of an ancient alien rail-gun launcher.
8. Iapetus, in a fit of sibling jealousy, has attempted to grow its own rings.
7. Percival Lowell accidentally based his sketches on the wrong planet.
6. This is the planet from Kim Stanley Robinson's "A Short, Sharp Shock", without the oceans.
5. The moon was tectonically separated aeons ago from Vallis Marineris.
4. This is the solar system's frenulum.
3. Ringworld deorbited here.
2. Not much, just loosening its belt after the holidays.
and..
1. That's No Moon...
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