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NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn
caffiend666 writes with news that scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a very large, previously unknown ring around the planet Saturn. According to NASA, if the ring were visible to the naked eye from Earth, it would cover a patch of sky roughly twice the angular diameter of the Moon.
"The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers. One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material. Saturn's newest halo is thick, too — its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring. ... The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers from Earth in orbit around the sun."
always had a giant ring around it?
...it wasn't a giant ring around Uranus.
Yeah, yeah, just thought I'd get that out of the way early.
Which was... "DUH!". Galileo discovered the "huge rings around Saturn". But reading deeper this is a fascinating find, that the invisible portion of the rings are way bigger than the spectacularly visible ones.
Corporatism != Free Market
I'm not sure I understand why something so large was missed by Voyager. I understand the difficulty of viewing something like this from Earth but those probes were right there.
A better headline would've been, "NASA Discovers Previously Unknown Ring Around Saturn"
Couldn't help myself, from TFA (emphasis added):
Before the discovery Saturn was known to have seven main rings named A through E and several faint unnamed rings.
What kind of a messed up numeral system do they use in NASA?
Joking aside, the ring divisions are labelled (from the closest to furthest) : D, C, B, A then F, G and finally E as the outermost ring.
Wonder what they will name this one, anyone good with sequence puzzles?
Wait a second, there's a *ring* around *Saturn*? Someone alert the media!
It sounds like it's a form of comet like trail left by a moon of Saturn. Makes you wonder if other moons leave debris trails?
Cool Dust? Wow, I could have used some of that in high school. This is undoubtedly part of some astronomy group's secret project to get back at the jocks.
So, it sounds like it shows up in the infrared. But, it must be filtered by our atmosphere, or something -- otherwise we'd be able to see it from the ground.
What a shame. It would be really cool to capture it with a DSLR.
sig: sauer
NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn
They figured it out just now?
This proves it. The moon landings were fake.
I don't know if you could consider this is part of the ring system around Saturn due to the fact that is start around 3.7 millions miles away from the planet and stretched out to its furthest at 7.4 millions miles; I'm not an astronomer by any means but I would consider this and asteroid belt of some sort; Saturn gravitation pulled cannot be that strong holding materials that far away.
So, where does Saturn *not* have rings?
Table-ized A.I.
Is this ring the source of the dark material on Iapetus?
(Looking at the images of Iapetus, my instant reaction was that it looked exactly like objects that I've spray-painted at an oblique angle -- and by analogy the dark surface MUST be accreted material from a dust cloud.)
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Now that the funny is out of the way...
I would think that this kind of discovery could close the gap for some of the physics problems we are trying to solve. Could the headline have read 'Missing matter discovered around Saturn'? Supposedly we are missing 75% of the matter in the universe or some percentage.
Ice in space? I wonder what we could do with that. Maybe Mars isn't so boring after all.
naked eye from Earth, it would cover a patch of sky roughly twice the angular diameter of the Moon
At first, I thought angular diameter sounded stupid (in the way saying "utilize" instead of "use" sounds stupid). I realized I didn't know what "angular diameter" meant, so I looked it up. Turns out, not only does it sound stupid, but it's wrong. Planets are spheres. They don't get distorted by viewing angle.
Whale
One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
I now pronounce you man and wife.
Free Martian Whores!
That's something that amazes me. Why doesn't the stuff making up the rings just orbit the planet like a cloud instead of flat rings in a plane? And now this, a ring that's in it's own plane?! Was it at one time a single object orbiting and then broke up and that's why it's on its own plane - the orbital momentum keeps it in place?
It's times like these I wish I were smart enough to be an astrophysicist!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
That's pretty effin' sparse.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
That's -193'C or 80 K if you're an actual scientist.
...has an inner radius of 5.9 million kilometers and extends to 17 million km.
That's "so huge it would take 1.03×10^29 Volkswagens to fill it"
JPL is a collection of buildings in California and does not speak. Perhaps the Oracle of JPL made this prophecy?
Unless the McDonalds in Charlottesville have changed recently, 10^29 Volkswagens would be a 'Large'. If you want supersized rings it's going to be an extra 49 cents.
If these rings are so see through and spread out how can you measure where the boundaries of it are?
Anything you "discover" is previously unknown, by definition. Otherwise, the headline would have said "rediscover".
You pedants, when will you learn?
Perhaps the headline should have been "NASA Discovers Additional Giant Ring Around Saturn". For a moment there I though NASA was just slow on the uptake.
Is anyone looking for these invisible rings in other places? Might Earth have one?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
No, Earth doesn't. We'd have noticed it by now if it did.
How do you discovery something if you didn't previously know it was there?
The very statemen Discovers Rings MEANS it was previously unknown.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is anyone looking for these invisible rings in other places?
Yes. Fools that they are.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
Wouldn't the moon be accreted from the ring? Why would Phoebe be shedding material? My understanding was that many rocky bodies in the solar system are formed by accretions from rings such as this, and once a sufficiently large body is formed, the ring begins to disappear as it falls onto the body or is flung out of orbit by the gravitational influence of said body. Can someone say why the articles think the process is going in reverse?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Saturn has four main groups of rings and three fainter, narrower ring groups. These groups are separated by gaps called divisions. Close up views of Saturn's rings by the Voyager spacecrafts, which flew by them in 1980 and 1981, showed that these seven ring groups are made up of thousands of smaller rings. The exact number is not known.
The main rings are extremely thin. They stretch 70,000 kilometres from their inner to outer edge, but are only about 100 metres thick. They are made of loose ice particles in all sorts of sizes.
"They go from the size of houses down to the finest ice particles, like the snow you might ski on in Utah" says Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini's imaging team and an expert on the rings.
Voyager showed that thousands of gaps break the main rings up into ringlets that are often only a few kilometres wide. In the pictures from Cassini, it is clear that some ringlets are narrower still, maybe only half a kilometre or less.
Those pictures also show that they have very sharp edges, even though the ice particles should be bouncing off each other and blurring the edges of the rings. "It's very mysterious - they must be held sharp by some mechanism," says Porco. "In some cases it is done by moons, but with many of the edges we don't know the mechanism."
Maybe some of the questions raised by Voyager and Cassini can be answered by these new findings.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
To rediscover is to discover again. Discovery doesn't rule out the possibility that someone discovered it already.
To be perfectly accurate, there are two possible interpretations, which present themselves to the average individual along this approximate train of thought upon reading that headline:
(A) NASA rediscovered the giant rings that I already knew about. Wait, unless NASA is filled with moronic dweebs who flunked out of high school, that can't be...
(B) NASA must have discovered another ring that they didn't already know about. Well, that makes more sense, but why didn't they just say so in the headline?
And there you have it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Bad catalytic converter making fume loops.
Table-ized A.I.
If we do, is it pink?
I want to have an invisible pink ring!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Okay, I've got a decent camera. Assuming I can find a high enough viewpoint that's far away from light pollution on a clear sky, how could I get a photo of Andromeda in the night sky with my camera? And where on the net could I go to find information on how to locate it in the sky? Because that would be absolutely AMAZING to get a photo of Andromeda in the night sky.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Technically I guess you could think of our equatorial-orbit artificial satellites as a ring...
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
I can sell you an invisible ring that keeps invisible tigers away! I've been wearing mine for years and in all that time didn't see a single invisible tiger!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
bah nonsense.... 1 for the class ring, 1 for going steady, you have the engagement ring, the mother's ring, the wedding ring, and subsequent annaversaies. Hell you could be married to one person and still end up with 5 rings just starting out. Anyways we have no proof the Saturn has been divorced in the past and kept previous rings... in fact... Saturn could be "THE BLACK WIDOW!!!" Duh Dum Daa!!!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I, for one, welcome our new Lord of the Rings.
No, because that could mean one of the many new rings found within the existing ring system. This headline is better because it suggests a ring even bigger than the known ones. It is a Giant in comparison. And indeed, that implication is quite correct.
Only to a Slashdot Pedant (a truly "special" kind of pedant) would the headline "NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn" not imply "previously unknown". Like there's a bunch of rings known to astronomers but not NASA!
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This diffuse ring is likely the source of the "two-faced" Iapetus - the leading side of Iapetus is blackened by the ring much like a car windshield can be blackened by running into insects. The material is presumably coming from Phoebe, another moon of Saturn, probably from impacts on that body.
I suspect that this is not the whole story, however. The particles in the ring are thought to be very small - but the dark splotches are hundreds of meters across. The ring may be braided (some of the others are), so that it can deliver a blast of particles, like a hose, on certain spots, but even that is not enough. Phoebe and the new ring are in retrograde orbits, thus collisions of this material with the prograde Iapetus will be "head-on" and fairly energetic, about 5 km / sec. So, it's not just that dark sticky stuff is plopping down onto the surface - the velocities are too high. It may be that a reaction with the surface, heating followed by the formation of something like black tar, is responsible for what we are seeing. If the current slow state of space exploration continues to hold it will probably be decades or more before we find out for sure.
It is not clear from reading the article if the material in the newly discovered ring would equal the mass of a billion Earths, or if the area the ring occupies would hold a billion Earths. Does anyone know?
Here is the original article on Spitzer's site: http://spitzer.caltech.edu/news/964-ssc2009-18-NASA-s-Spitzer-Spots-Clump-of-Swirling-Planetary-Material
It's in regard to earth volumes.
The enemies of Democracy are
Me too, but I'm Stevie Wonder.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Will they need to redo the opening of all those movies and TV shows where they fly past the planets? You know what sticklers for scientific accuracy they are.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Know thy classics
NASA posted a great composite shot a few years ago showing the full moon and the Andromeda galaxy at the same angular scale.
Astronomy Picture of the Day: Moon over Andromeda.
I think we all have become too comfortable in our collective knowledge of the solar system. The only problem is we don't really know that much at all. A lot of Astronomy 101 textbooks are going to be re-written in the next couple of decades.
Yes, but you have to know what an invisible ring looks like.
Or "NASA discovered more crap around Saturn"
I believe the headline was intended to be funny or at least ironic.
Who is his partner and where are they registered?
Why was there only an "artist's conception"? Surely there was an original image or mosaic?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Saturn makes bathtubs?
Free Martian Whores!
We are making one.
^^ Yes. You, sir, win one Internet.
How long have they had telescopes that could do this thing and never pointed it at local planets? I sure hope they look at Uranus and see if there are any infrared klingons they might have missed.
Question: why do some planets have rings and others do not?
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Just looking at the dimensions of this thing doesn't bring to mind the image of a 'ring' especially with what it is understood in context to Saturn. Maybe call it a region or belt?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Onion rings.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I sure hope the optics on that thing were inspected and certified to be scratch & lint free.
Also that the shape was made according to SI units vs english.
To discover is to find something that was previously unknown. The headline is fine. Unless it should say "Nasa finds something that was previously unknown previously unknown ring around Saturn." The key word in the headline is "giant". Who did what, where.
Today i discovered that one of my external harddrives is in exactly the same place i left it a week ago.
I have an invisible ring around my house. It's great.
If you're talking about the "average individual", I think you'd better consider interpretation C:
(C) NASA? Shit, this isn't the funnies page.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
NASA (never a straight answer) have been ordered to make all pic's from the cassini spacecraft top secret.. Funny because the space craft is orbiting Satan and would be well place to investigate this.
Doing some rough caluclations, thats about 3 * 10^14 particles. That could be a vast amount of matter, or the equivalent of a few buckets of flour. How big are they?
Only one billion earths ? Just ask DC, then, they've got infinite earths.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I had the opportunity to see Spitzer while it was being constructed at Ball Aerospace in Boulder. The solid beryllium mirror was quite beautiful.
Really? Lucky you. Mine likes to wander off into impossible-to-find places like the sock drawer or the crisper bin. Really keeps me on my toes...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.