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The Return of Saturn's Spokes
CheshireCatCO writes "After more than a year in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has finally spotted 'spokes' in the rings. Spokes, large radial structures in the rings, where seen by the Voyager spacecraft and have remained difficult to fully explain. The reappearce of the spokes comes about two years earlier than many models predicted."
Yeah, but what do models know? A lot of them don't even have degrees.
Astronomers have noticed a giant baseball card embedded in the spokes to make saturn feel like its a real motorcycle.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Clearly the Saturnians are using space elevators to reach the rings... duh!
It is really quite simple.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
Everyone knows that the spokes keep the rings equidistant from the planet while providing lateral stability! Hello!
Isn't the most obvious reason that an asteroid or meteoroid or something similar simply hit the rings and broke apart? Is there some reason why this isn't likely?
"Unlike Voyager or Hubble, Cassini is in a unique position to study ring spoke phenomena at Saturn."
With Celestia, you can actually follow Cassini's path as it follows Saturn. It really puts the above statement in perspective (plus it makes u feel like an astronaut).
Hang on...
The (completely insane and already disproven multiple times) Electric Universe theory has only been talking about these rings since 2004.
These spokes were first spotted in the '80's.
Isn't this a bit like "I have a theory, this theory is that Orange Polkadotted Jet Propelled Chickens from the Pleides are currently touring the universe blowing up stars. The last star they visited was SN1987A, and sure enough observations back me up".
If they predicted it before they hit Saturn, then maybe we'd pay attention. But seeing how they predicted it after it had already been observerd places you fairly in the OPJPC camp.
There is another theory that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created Saturn's ring spokes.
Could the magnetic fields be seasonal? I'm no expert but might that explain why they seem to appear and disappar periodically?
from http://www.astronomynotes.com/solarsys/s16.htm
though there may be other information available which I am unaware of, of course. But if this particle size stands, it seems a fairly simple explaination that a meteroid could hit a large ring object and cascade debris and impact effects throughout the rings themselves...
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In a word, no.
The spokes must be tied to the magnetic field of Saturn. This explains why the stay at the same magnetic longitude of the planet and why they don't wind up as the inner parts of the rings orbit the planet faster. So they're not disturbances in the ring particles themselves, since the ring particles are too massive to really feel the magnetic field.
However, if you levitated dust over the rings, that would do the trick. The problem is how to levitate the dust. It turns out that you can develop a negative potential on the rings (I think it's negative... I forget, to be honest) which can repel the dust and cause it to hover. So under the right conditions, if dust were kicked up by a small collision in ther rings (say a meteroid collision), it can float over the rings and spread radially, making a spoke.
Or so we think...
Clearly the Flying Spaghetti Monster has put planet-sized representations of His Noodly Appendages into orbit around Saturn to show us his majestic power.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Does it never occur to people that what they read on the internet isn't always true?
No, that is true that they never... don't not... dis-consider.... never mind. People are twits.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The theory I heard is that the ring particles pick up a charge from being bombarded by particles trapped in the radiation belts. When a meteoroid plows through them, it breaks small, dust-like particles off. Being light and charged, these particles are picked up by the rotating magnetic field and circle the planet as a radial spoke. As the charge leaks off of the dust, the dust particles go into normal orbits with the ones farther in orbiting faster, so the spoke spreads out into a wedge and then dissipates.
There's nothing that we do that would lead to radial features. Especially across multiple images at consistent magnetic longitudes. Also, these have been seen by at least three or four cameras, now. So it's hard to imagine these being artifacts.
(In fact, the images on the space.com site might even be the raw images.)
I don't think you failed not to avoid being unclear.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Heathen. Clearly the Spokes will occur in, relate to, or somehow be connected to, the number five.
Saturn was the Father of the Gods, but Eris is clearly showing us she can make him wear the galactic tu-tu.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Clearly the Spokes will occur in, relate to, or somehow be connected to, the number five.
You should repent now, for His Noodly Will is nigh.
In the meantime, I think we can clearly see that, like global temperatures, the number of Saturnian Spokes is inversely related to the number of pirates. The decline in pirates has obviously caused an increase in the number Noodly Saturnian Spokes.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is true. And the decline in Pirates is clearly due to the ancient, noble fued between the Pirates and the Ninja. Clearly this senseless violence must stop, lest the world come that much closer to the Great Heat Death, from which only the Lord Kelvin, who Loves US, and wants to CONSERVE OUR SOULS FROM ENTROPY, can protect us from.
Fnord.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
It's adolescent rubbish that (as far as I have been able to discern from their writings) Earth used to orbit Saturn, or that Venus was calved off of Saturn in immediate prehistory. It's almost certain that within that same period there were terrifying Aurorae Australis, bright enough to be seen by day. It's unlikely that there's no fusion going on within the sun, but very possible that the sun's chromosphere is a plasma "double layer" that accelerates into the corona those particles that overcome its activation threshold, producing the corona's astonishing temperature.
It's likely that galaxies are not organized around "billion-solar-mass black holes," and that quasars are no more distant or energetic than the nearby Seyfert galaxies they cluster about. It's visibly true that currents in the interstellar plasma self-organize into intertwining filaments and extended membranes that sometimes fluoresce, exactly like neon lights, to produce stunningly beautiful nebular displays.
It's an easy bet that cosmologists' notions of "dark matter" and "dark energy" adding up to over 99 times as much stuff as the visible universe are fantasies ginned up to rescue failed hypotheses. It's a matter of public record that astrophysicists, as a rule, have only rudimentary training in the dynamics of the plasma that they admit fills all of space, but insist on calling "ionized gas".
Whatever their failings, the Electric Universe people have the best astronomical picture gallery on the web.
When the things you call "crackpot theories" correctly predict what will happen in many astronomical situations where "genuine research" is continuously surprised at results they didn't expect then you have to wonder who is telling the truth.
And when crapot theories fail to make correct predictions it's just an oversight that could be corrected if the mainstream scientists didn't block research funding for "alternative science" projects.
Who is getting it right in the first place? electric universe has the better track record here.
Um, no. The reason why theories like the electric universe are called crackpot science is because they correct only sometimes, and blatantly incorrect most of the time. The reason why mainstream science is, well mainstream, is because it is correct most of the time. Unfortunately, crackpots like to emphasize science's mispredictions and hide their own shorcommings under the rug.
like global temperatures, the number of Saturnian Spokes is inversely related to the number of pirates
Given that the number of intellectual property pirates has increased dramatically in recent years, is it possible that that global temperatures and Saturnian spokes will decrease in the near future?
Save the planet! Pirate music/videos/software!
If God had meant for man to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it later in the day.
Whatever their failings, the Electric Universe people have the best astronomical picture gallery [thunderbolts.info] on the web.
ummmm, that's arguable. Check out APOD.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Inertia is a property of matter where objects in motion remain in motion, and objects at rest remain at rest unless acted on by some external force (Newton's First Law). The more mass an object has, the more inertia, and thus, the harder it is to change the speed and direction of it in motion. In the case of rings, we are concerned with how easy it is to make the ring spin faster (or slower) - this is angular momentum. We want to minimize angular momentum so that the rings' responsiveness will be maximized. The thing about angular momentum is that it's not just how much the ring weighs, but the distribution of weight (mass, really) that really matters. Suppose you had a ring that weighed 100 million pounds. If the rim weighed 99.99 million pounds, that'd be one tough wheel to turn. But, if instead you had that 99 million pounds in the planetary core, it wouldn't be such a chore to spin the ring. The spokes are there to just transfer the enegy from the mass at the core to the rim of the ring. Centripetal force is the force that compels a body to move in a circular path. According to the law of inertia, in the absence of forces, an object moves in a straight line at a constant speed. An outside force must act on an object to make it move in a curved path. When you whirl a stone around on a string, you must pull on the string to keep the stone from flying off in a straight line. The force the string applies to the object is the centripetal force. The word centripetal is from two Latin words meaning to seek the center. Centripetal force acts in other ways as well. For example, a speeding automobile tends to move in a straight line. Centripetal force must act on the car to make it travel around a curve. This force comes from the friction between the tires and the pavement. If the pavement is wet or icy, this frictional force is reduced. The car may then skid off the road because there is not enough centripetal force to keep it moving in a curved path. Gyroscope inertia is the tendency of a spinning body to resist change in the direction of its axis. Inertia keeps the axis of a spinning top straight up until the top slows. Use the Right Hand Rule. Form your RIGHT hand in the "hitch hiker" mode. The fingers represent the spin direction of the wheel, and the thumb represents the directional force of the gyroscope axis. Angular Momentum (A) is the force of a rotating object. A=mvr (m=mass, v=velocity, r=radius). Centrifugal force is the force arising in a rotating reference system. It points away from the center, in the direction opposite to the centripetal force. Centripetal force is the force that causes an object to change direction. For uniform circular motion, the force is directed toward the center of the circle and has a magnitude given by mv2/r.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N