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Saturn's Moons Built From Ring Material

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the lookit-all-them-moons-up-there dept.

LiquidCoooled writes "Two of Saturn's small moons look eerily like flying saucers, new observations by the Cassini spacecraft reveal. The moons, which lie within the giant planet's rings, may have come by their strange shape by gradually accumulating ring particles in a ridge around their equators."

7 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Actually relevant by explosivejared · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wow, the "that's no moon" comments actually have some relevance now, as one can say "that's not moon... it's aggregated ring material that only looks like a moon!"

    --
    I got a catholic block.
  2. Re:Moon with a wall by Tejin · · Score: 3, Informative
    The moon is Iapetus. It has a walnut shape and a massive equatoral wall. It's a possible explanation, though Iapetus orbits outside the ring system, and off-plane.

    Then again there could be a 'black ring' further out which explains the two-tone colouring of the moon and the equatoral wall. The only problem is that we haven't detected and rings out there.

    --
    The seekers do no need truth, the seekers do find truth and the finding do be painful
  3. Re:Too much to ask? by JonWan · · Score: 4, Informative

    I thought so too.So I googled and found this. May be redundant now tho.

    http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/saturn/atlas.html

  4. Real Images of Pan and Atlas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2865 //and congratulations to New Scientist for the most annoying holiday ad ever.

  5. Re:Too much to ask? by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the data came from Cassini ISS and since we're the authors on the paper, I feel no qualms about suggesting visiting http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=73

  6. Re:News? by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 4, Informative

    Probably. The problem is that the rings can't accrete into moons because of tidal forces. (They do form temporary aggregates, but those tear apart again in roughly one orbital period.) So the presence of moons in this region is a bit of a mystery. One possibility was that they were large shards of whatever body broke up and formed the rings. What we found in our research is that there are indeed seed-cores in the middles of the moons, but that the moons then accreted a lot more material into a mantle, lowering their densities to almost absurdly small values and reshaping them. The moons you have now are a hybrid of progenitor material and ring particles.

  7. Re:Check out the movie by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because he did the research and, more importantly, put the movie together.

    Honestly, Sebastien's English is so much better than my French, I would never complain.