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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!
"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.
The rings aren't very solid; most of the material is believed to be ice crystals that are, at most, a few meters in diameter. And despite their apparent solidity from here, they're an awful lot of empty space.
Chances are pretty good that an asteroid would just sail right through the rings unimpeded. If it did hit something, it wouldn't be stopped. The inertia of the (small) body it hit would almost certainly be completely overcome by the incoming inertia of the asteroid. If it hit hard enough to break the asteroid apart, the result might look something like a shotgun blast, with a spray of asteroid chunks and a tiny bit of ring material continuing roughly along the same path the asteroid had been following. The 'hole' in the rings would almost certainly be filled within hours or days.
If the asteroid happened to be slow enough to be captured into orbit, and happened to be on the same plane as the rings, it could potentially join the ring system. Over time, it might be torn apart by tidal forces into small chunks and blend in with the rest of the material.
No matter what, it wouldn't just hit them and explode in place. The rings aren't nearly solid enough for that. It'd be like trying to stop a bullet with a sheet of Saran Wrap, perhaps with rice stuck to it.
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...