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Saturn's Moons Built From Ring Material
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."
Saturn's Rings are made of moon material? Is this chick or egg?
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The earth isn't a planet, it's aggregated stellar dust that looks like a planet!
A planet/moon is just aggregated dust from something. Being aggregated ring dust doesn't make it less of a moon.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I thought so too.So I googled and found this. May be redundant now tho.
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/saturn/atlas.html
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.