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Blue Ring Around Uranus
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."
I should get that checked out....
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
If ever there were a topic begging for a goatse post, this is it.
In other news, Uranus has filed suit against Neptune for making it pick up the soap, which Pluto clearly dropped.
Good news! It's a suppository!
You will see me around a lot today...
we've found the proverbial "blue moon?"
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
OMG! Pretty rainbows around a planet. Did they find ponies also?
Table-ized A.I.
Still not a serious comment on the news story...
In any case, I found it odd that when MSNBC reported on this a few days ago they called the ring "rare". Considering that we have a whole 8-10 planets to base this on (depending on who's definition you use of "planet") I would consider the 20-25% of "blue ring" planets to be fairly common. It's not like this is an albino Kodiak or some other anomaly.
Aside from that have a blast mocking the planet for it's unfortunate name. What were they thinking? It's like naming a boy Sue or some such nonsense.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
How is NASA going to pitch the missions?
The Uranus Probes?
I'd hate to be the mission-director for that one...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
what's the same about star trek and toilet paper? they both circle uranus searching for klingons!
Every single Slashdotter who thinks they're hilarious will inevitably make their way down the comments, groan that they weren't the first to the joke, and then attempt to make one anyway.. ... the thought clearly never crossed my mind! Ahem.
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
In other news the 10th 'planet' has finally been named Mykok, pronounced Mick Oak.
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
As long as the ring is not red and itchy, Uranus will be fine.
Well thats exactly what it is, however the moons history orbiting earth has left it with a different composition from asteroids. The moon has hardly any water, while many asteroids are now known to have a lot of water.
So the distinction is still important. The real gray area is with the small outer moons of Jupiter which are called moons but are certainly captured asteroids.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"[+] uranus, science, space, astronomy, anal (tagging beta)"
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Upon discovery of the blue ring NASA administrators immediatly began a search for an Astroproctologist.
a)orbiting the sun, or
b)orbiting an object that is orbiting the sun.
Asteroids orbiting the sun are called centaurs, and there are millions of them. Some asteroids are in orbit of planets, such as the moons of Mars. Saturn's moon Phoebe is almost certainly a captured asteroid, as are Jupiter's outer moons, and inner ones such as Amalthea.
In general, the easiest difference between an asteroid and a 'small moon' is that a small moon has been pulled by its own gravity into a spherical shape.
That's not a hard and fast definition though. Saturn's moon Hyperion is in an irregular shape (one side is basically sheared off) but there are smaller moons that have the spherical shape.
Don't get too hung up on names. Our moon was called that long before the seventeenth century, which was the first time anything was found orbiting a body other than the sun.
In fairness, the Greek was pronounced something closer to "oorenos" (with a long "o" at the end). The problem comes with putting a "y" before the "ou" vowel; that's an artifact of Latin.
All's true that is mistrusted
The thought occurs that since the ring is blue, it might have formed by some object having rammed Uranus pretty hard. This doesn't fully explain the red ring, but in either case, this theory sounds good on the whole.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
Exactly.
Uranus is the Latinized form of Ouranos, Greek name of the sky. The 'yu' pronunciation is an example of an iotated vowel. The derivation from the Greek shows that the 'yu' sound is an artifact. I am not aware if it came in with the Ancient Roman pronunciation of the latinised version or whether it has come in only recently with the English pronunciation of the latinised spelling. I suspect the latter. Some English speakers seem to like to iotate 'u' sounds, an example being 'nyuclear'.
Most dictionaries give the un-iotated version as a possible pronunciation and I certainly find it a less compromising pronunciation to use.
Do you remember some years ago when the first probe visited Uranus? The astronomers couldn't talk about "our probe of Uranus" with straight faces, so they changed the planet's pronunciation from "your anus" to "urinous." Not that "our urinous probe" is much better, if you ask me.
German: Ihr Anus
Dutch: uw anus
French: vos anus
Italian: il vostro anus
Portuguese: seu anus
Spanish: su anus
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.