Slashdot Mirror
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."
Did you even read the articles?
quote:
JPL spokeswoman Whitney Clavin said the ring is very diffuse and doesn't reflect much visible light but the infrared Spitzer telescope was able to detect it.
"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer.
I wonder if they were named in sequence (A, B, C ... ) as they were discovered, not as they lie from closest to farthest. I could understand as equipment got better, NASA was able to send spacecraft closer, etc., more rings would be identified.
Yes. The BBC article states that this ring is the cause of the dark matter on Iapetus. Iapetus is tidally locked to Saturn, so will always present the same side to the direction of motion in its orbit. This side is the darker side of Iapetus and it seems to fit perfectly that this is due to collisions with the particles from this ring over the eons like bugs on a cosmic windscreen.
Personally, I'd be more preoccupied with trying to breathe and not instantly freeze to death.
You wouldn't really instantly freeze, that's a misconception. Without being in direct contact with something, like an atmosphere, there's no heat transfer via conduction or convection. In a vacuum you only lose heat via radiation, and you know that's pretty slow, since Vacuum flasks can keep things hot for a really long time.
So yeah, breathing would be your concern.
Losing heat by radiation is only slow when there's lots of stuff around you radiating back. According to this humans lose between 50% and 60% of their heat from radiation. When you are floating exposed in space NONE of that heat comes back. It's not instant freezing, but it's not exactly slow either.