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Blue Ring Around Uranus

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the too-many-hours-looking-through-a-telescope dept.

ZedNaught writes "The BBC is reporting that 'astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System. Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon.' According to the April issue of Science, the blue ring is one of two new outer rings recently discovered around Uranus using the infrared Keck adaptive optics system. The rings are blue and red like Saturn's E and G rings. The blue ring around Saturn hosts the moon Enceladus while the Uranus ring contains the moon Mab."

3 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. moon disintegrating by lm747 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Quite interesting... Uranus' moon is part of the ring - the particles are hitting it - and the moon is slowly disintegrating. Wonder how long it will take for the moon to completely dissolve into the ring.

    --
    --- lm747
    1. Re:moon disintegrating by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Wonder how long it will take for the moon to completely dissolve into the ring.

      The density of the ring doesn't have to be much for it to be visible, and its mass at any one time will be a fraction of the mass of even a very small moon. I don't have the numbers but I suspect the life of that moon will be measured in billions of years, quite possibly longer than the life of the sun.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
  2. Re:Let's face it, we all sniggered by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "In fairness, the Greek was pronounced something closer to 'oorenos'"

    This raises the point how we somehow insist on pronouncing words from other languages as if they are English when they are not.

    Most people do not pronounce kilometer (kilo-meter not kil-OM-eter'), diplodocus (die-ploh-doh-cuss not dip-PLOD-duh-cuss) and archeopteryx (ark-ay-oh-tear-icks not ar-key-OP-tuh-ricks') correctly either.

    In reality, Uranus is pronounced 'throat-wobbler mangrove' (;P)