Strange New Objects Seen In Saturn's Rings

Every 15 Earth years, Saturn has its equinox — the time during which its rotational axis is perpendicular to the rays from the sun, so that the sun is always directly "overhead" of Saturn's equator. This is significant because Saturn's rings orbit over the equator, so during the equinox, light from the sun hits them edge-on. This means that any objects wider than the rings, or orbiting above or below them, cast long shadows and are much easier to see. For the first time, we're able to get detailed images of these objects, thanks to Cassini. A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter, has been discovered in the B-ring, and the Bad Astronomy blog points out another object that seems to be bursting through the F-ring. Quoting: "The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed into the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

Comments

Savages

[Anonymous Coward]

A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter

Can we have that in perches, chains and furlongs please?

--A. Luddite

Re:Savages

[simcop2387]

78.7877212121212 perches == 19.6969303030 chains == 1.96969303030303 furlongs

Re:Savages

[hazem]

producers who decided Americans were too stupid to know what a Newton is.

Of course we know what a Newton is... you just have to decide if you're going to go with one of the newer fruit varieties or to stick with the classic Fig.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fig_Newton)

That's no moon

[Linknoid]

It's a budong.

Re:That's no moon

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Or maybe a monolith...

Re:That's no moon

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You surely meant to write "Stan shot first!"

Re:That's no moon

[Deuxsonic]

It was changed to Jupiter for the movie because Stanley Kubrick couldn't find a good image of Saturn (this was 1968, so a lot of the great images we have today didn't exist.) The book retains the original planet of Saturn, yet strangely it gets changed to Jupiter in the later books (I guess to be canon with the movie?)

Re:That's no moon

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Douglas Trumbull, the man who created the effects for 2001, told Kubrick that Saturn was too hard to depict realistically. As for why the setting was different in the other novels, in an author's note in 2061, Clarke claimed that each novel took place in a different parallel universe. My personal reason is that Clarke's original novels are all terrific, but his sequels are all terrible. Especially those god-awful Rama books he co-wrote with Gentry Lee. And yet, I couldn't stop reading them. I hate myself.

Re:That's no moon

[BollocksToThis]

The movie was originally shot to finish at Saturn but Kubrick changed his mind.

I bet it was the commute that did him in.

radial distance?

[N7DR]

I haven't been able to find a reference that states the precise radial location of this object. Does anyone here have that information?

The Voyager 2 photopolarimeter data from 1981 suggested the presence of a small object in Saturn's B ring at a radial distance of around 109,000 km.

It would be interesting to know whether this is confirmation of that object, 28 years later.

(I have a vested interest: I was the principal author on the Voyager paper: Icarus 54, 267 (1983).)

Re:radial distance?

[spacemandave]

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

Re:radial distance?

[MartinSchou]

Obviously I haven't read that paper, nor any related papers on the subject ...

But wouldn't you expect to see pieces of the rings coalesces into larger objects (I'm guessing under the same forces that make planets) and then be destroyed by gravity continually?

Re:radial distance?

[N7DR]

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

Thanks very much; that's a much better source of information than TFA.

Re:radial distance?

[j-stroy]

The rings are non-concentric at that point. Pushing the brightness levels to expand bright artifacts shows interesting "twisting" (look on each side lower on left, higher on right) The close-up views miss some details that a "big picture" shows, reductionism, feh.

We assume an orientation of the anomaly parallel to Saturn's axis, but from the brightness of the reflected light on the "dark side" of it suggests an angle maybe closer to that of the ring plane... remember where the sun is. Although, it could be illumination of backscatter from Saturn, or by internal reflections between the particles.

Ring particles could be caused to move by electrostatics, not just gravity or collision, so I'm thinking a long plasma trail behind a comet passing thru, or a slower moving (orbital?) charged object causing a ruction. Heck, why not a moving cloud of magnetic particles colliding with the ring bits, which are then drawn along Saturns magnetic field.

Re:radial distance?

[CheshireCatCO]

Actually, no. Gravity WILL, in effect, pull objects apart thanks to tides. This is what keeps the rings from accreting into a single body, more or less. So gravity, while most simply an attractive force, *can* actual cause repulsion. (Another fine example is the F ring itself, which is shepherded by two moons. The moons push the ring back when it tries to spread toward the moons.)

This is what keeps the rings from accreting, more or less. And collisions are so slow that grinding isn't a *huge* factor, although some amount of re-collection of dust onto macroscopic particles probably helps that significantly.

Re:radial distance?

[SL Baur]

No, while I haven't read the papers either, I can confirm that gravity will not be the force pulling objects apart, at least not directly, as it is an attractive force.

Maybe you should do some reading. Start with googling "roche limit". Tidal forces ripping an object apart are how the rings got formed in the first place.

Oh dear

[Joe Jay Bee]

Could this be one of the few threads where the Goatse guy is on-topic? After all, numerous strange objects have been seen in his ring.