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Remains of Shattered Moon Found in Saturn's Rings
Riding with Robots writes "Scientists have announced that they have used images from the robotic spacecraft Cassini to find moonlets embedded in Saturn's outer rings that are likely the remains of a larger moon that was shattered by an asteroid or comet. The team from the University of Colorado at Boulder that made the discovery has now posted details and pictures."
It's a space station!
Two earthworms in love?
Perhaps you mean a different thing than I do when you say "science."
I was disappointed when I found out that asteroid belts don't really look like the one we saw in Empire Strikes Back. It's been suggested that a planetary ring system would be a more likely candidate for closely-spaced celestial objects to fly around. Is that the case or would the closest object still be too tiny to resolved with the unaided eye?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The presence of planetary rings indicates a relatively recent astronomical event like this. Since Saturn has these pronounced rings, it cannot have been too long ago (in cosmic terms) that something like a moon or large planetoid was disintegrated in its vicinity. Eventually, the gravity of Saturn will suck the rings in and the cool ringed planet will become the ex-ringed planet.
Neptune is another planet with rings which are far fainter, so it is likely that Neptune's lunar disintegration event happened to a much smaller object somewhat longer ago.
Uranus, if it ever had rings, has swept clean its area. While not as pretty as a ringed planet, Uranus may pose less of a danger to probes since less damaging material encircles the planet.
One is that the rings were born at the same time as the planet itself -- they were left-over debris that became enslaved to the gas giant, doomed to orbit it for eternity.
The other is that the rings were the remains of large icy moons that broke into smaller pieces over time.
The problem with this latter theory has been that collisions of such a kind normally create debris in a wide range of sizes, from big lumps a kilometer (half a mile) wide to pebbles a few centimetres (inches) across.
The big pieces are already known, for there are kilometre- (half-mile) moons called Pan, Daphnis and Atlas that jostle their way around the rings, and photographs taken by scout probes have shown countless small pieces.
Until last year, what was missing were the medium-size pieces.
"It seems unlikely that moonlets are remainders of a single catastrophic event that created the whole ring system, because in this case a uniform distribution would emerge"
From the summary:
"...moonlets embedded in Saturn's outer rings that are likely the remains of a larger moon that was shattered by an asteroid or comet."
So the article says that it's unlikely that it was a single event. The summary says that it was a moon being shattered, which of course would fit the definition of a single catastrophic event. What am I overlooking here?
If there are chunks that big and so much matter all in one pretty flat disk (ie close to each other) then how come it doesn't all suck itself into one big piece? That's what supposedly happened to earth and we got one big moon and no ring. How does the ring stay a ring and not gravitize together?
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this guy? http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33526/
That shattered moon will just have to pick up the pieces and carry on like everyone else.
O-Qua Tangin Wann.
...this is a result of (god/allah/the great bellybutton in the sky) playing billiards. He was aiming for the moon to get knocked into the corner pocket, but ended up putting a bit too much force into the shot. Oh well, his next shot should be golden, he's going to try and pocket the Earth into the sun. Ever wondered why the Mayan calendar counts down?
Only one force in the known universe is capable of unleashing such a devastating blast.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I can't help but suspect that you are manipulating Uranus for cheap laughs
Bah! I know the signature of a galactic overlord when I see it. Clearly, this was Xenu practicing for his earth-bound creation myth. Everyone who sees that should tremble before Elron. Err, Xenu. (Banish all suspicion that Elron was Xenu.) Especially the wheezing little short-guy who's running the scientolopgy scam nowadays. He should tremble more than usual, in fact.
In any case, it's only fitting the remnants be named Xenu in honor of their too-scary ethanol and glycol abusing creator.
Can the Myth Busters test this by smashing an asteroid in orbit around Earth? I wanna ring too.
Table-ized A.I.
From TFA: "A narrow belt harboring moonlets as large as football stadiums discovered in Saturn's outermost ring probably resulted when a larger moon was shattered by a wayward asteroid or comet eons ago, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study."
Typical slashdot; recycled news from millions of years ago This story is probably a dupe from then.
Probably because unlike you, they're not idiots. They infer likely outcomes from what they've seen before, instead of just making random shit up. Do you really have to ask all sorts of retarded questions in hope of getting modded up?
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
So is Charon a Moolet or a dwarf moon? I think it's time for another vote.
Come on, let's nuke our moon into a ring. A ring is way cooler than a moon.
And the tides are overrated anyway, I guess.
Could be worse. Could be raining.
I have been seeing relevant xkcd links in a lot of recent /. discussions recently. Is there no topic that they haven't covered? Or is the author following /. stories and quickly making up something that will fit? o_0
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Do you need a NASA grant to develop the ideas?
I'm currently a political aide to a Senator in Washington....
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
So the folks at Boulder announced it, but did they really discover it? Cassini's a pretty sophisticated robot and did all of the observation and a lot of the discerning and differentiation work, so when do we start to give credit where credit is due? It's now generally accepted that Rosalind Franklin was one of the primary discoverers of DNA (Watson's petty and dismissive BS aside), so why is this so different? A robot discovered this (former) moon, not a human. Do we name it after Cassini?
Just a thought.
I think not...(*poof*)
Even as a young child gazing into the skies at night, and marvelling at the bright rainbow coloured rings boldly circling the planet Saturn, I always thought to myself 'You know, there is probably a moon in them that rings'
Time to bring in Bob the Builder, Bruce Willis, MacGuyver and a roll of tape.
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Is this something new? Didn't Arthur C. Clarke wrote about the ring's origins in 1968's A Space Odyssee? Correct me if I am wrong.
There is no sig.
/evercrack
Saturn's rings are composed largely of water ice with some impurities. Frozen ugly bags of mostly water.
...but if something similar were undertaken in the future (fly a robot mission to the rings, fuse blocks together, return them to the inner Solar System), we could check the blocks of ice for traces of former life. Scientists are excited about the prospect of xenobiology under Europa's icy crust ...it would be a lot easier to sift through the rubble of Saturn's rings for traces of dead organisms preserved in the vacuum of space than to send a Cryobot to melt through miles of ice in the hope of finding extraterrestrial life.
In 1952, Isaac Asimov wrote a story called "The Martian Way", where colonists on Mars got sick of paying Earth to export water (and Earth politicians said the colonists were Wasters anyhow). The Martian Scavengers flew to Saturn, chose a large fragment of ice, reshaped it into a cylinder, embeded their ships in it, and flew it like a giant ship back to Mars. Using the fragment's ice as reaction mass, they were able to make the return trip in five weeks.
We now know they'd have to melt many fragments together instead of having a cubic mile chip to reshape
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
That moon irritated me, so I taught it a lesson. Let that serve as a reminder to all of you of my power, and tread carefully in modding my posts down.
Glad you could join us
You can't take the sky from me...
I know that the CU team wrote their press-release to make it sound like they're the first to discover propellers in the rings, but these were first found and identified as moonlets in a paper released a year and a half ago in Nature. The discovered was Matt Tiscareno at Cornell.
What this new paper finds is some new propellers and that these moonlets might exist only within a belt in the rings.
I love finding out about stuff like this! Too cool! Imagine if we could have watched this. Smashed to bits and embedded like shards in the rings. Good thing those pieces never made it to us...or did they??? Hmmmm
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