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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."
...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.
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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?
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.
Either you misread the explanation or I did.
One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
I now pronounce you man and wife.
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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.
They put a ring around the ring so you can rosie around the rosie.
If these rings are so see through and spread out how can you measure where the boundaries of it are?
I think they did!
I think you're wrong.
The object's size subtends an angle from the point of view of an observer. This angle is (roughly) the size of the object divided by its distance from the observer.
It's a very useful way to discuss an object's apparent size in the sky, especially when you compare it to the size of a well known object like the Moon.
So, they're claiming that, if you could see this ring, it would appear to cover an area of sky roughly twice the size of the Moon. Which is surprisingly large.
Try reading that wikipedia page again. You're doing it wrong.
Anything you "discover" is previously unknown, by definition. Otherwise, the headline would have said "rediscover".
You pedants, when will you learn?
Is anyone looking for these invisible rings in other places? Might Earth have one?
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What's hard to understand about that?
It even said: It's the apparent size.
In other words, the angular size is how big something looks if you disregard how far away it is.
For instance, here is a picture of a bird silhouetted against the moon. The bird is close to the viewer (appearing large) and the moon very far away (appearing small). Although we know it's huge, the moon looks like it's nearly the same size as the bird. Their visual diameters are nearly the same.
Here's another picture of a bird silhouetted against the moon. In this one, the bird is quite far away (though nowhere near as far away as the moon), and looks small in comparison. The moon is about the same size (visual diameter) as it was in the last picture, but the visual diameter of the bird is much smaller.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If there's not a similar object around Jupiter, my speculation is that it's either from a recent collision, or a moon like Enceladus spouting off gas due to tidal friction. If there is a similar object around Jupiter, then I'd lean toward it being merely a result of having lots of gravity. However, Jupiter also has "spouty" moons.
Table-ized A.I.
No, Earth doesn't. We'd have noticed it by now if it did.
no they aren't. they are slightly distorted due to gravitational pull from whatever they orbit.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
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?
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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.
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If we do, is it pink?
I want to have an invisible pink ring!
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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!
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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!!!
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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.
You explain the concept well, but I have to wonder: Do you keep a collection of pictures of birds silhouetted against the moon around just in case you need to explain angular diameter?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes. If you'd like to pose, I offer quite competitive rates.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Spouting gas produces rings? That explains my laundry...
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
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
No idea, but I sure miss Carl Sagan. He would explain if he was still here.
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Me too, but I'm Stevie Wonder.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Indeed, so feeble is the ring that scientists have calculated that if all the material were gathered up, it would fill a crater on Phoebe no more than a kilometre across.
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.
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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.
Maybe Saturn has a problem with ring around the collar.
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.
area. the mass is minimal. from a bbc article "Indeed, so feeble is the ring that scientists have calculated that if all the material were gathered up, it would fill a crater on Phoebe no more than a kilometre across."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8291905.stm
Relax. Have a muffin. Enjoy the show. --Slick, Sept 13th, 2007.
Or "NASA discovered more crap around Saturn"
As an astronomy professor (teaching an observational class this term), I can tell you that you're wrong. Angular diameter is a often-used and highly appropriate way of measuring things on the sky. I can't understand why you're concerned about them being spheres, though. (There is little distortion because the distance over the diameter is very small, meaning we see nearly the entire hemisphere facing us and that the small angle approximation is valid.)
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.
I kinda figured that because I don't know the physics of this too well but if it were really large, dense particles it wouldn't be able to hold them in an orbit that far away from the planet, right? So it has to be really tiny particles and not a lot of them or they'd just go flying off into space. Now if it sound they found a "ring" of 50 decent sized moons floating around that distance away, that would be shocking!
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Mass of the particles is irrelevant. It cancels out in the math.
It's the same principle as Galileo's experiment where he dropped different sized masses from the leaning tower of Pisa and proved that heavier objects don't fall any faster than light ones. Different weights fall at the same speeds.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Planets are spheres. They don't get distorted by viewing angle.
The Earth is 7,926 mi in diameter at the equator, but 7,901 mi wide pole-to-pole. Viewed from above a pole, it would look like a circle, while from the plane of the solar system, it looks like an ellipse, and you'll get a different diameter measurement depending on the slice you take. I would assume that any spinning quasi-sphere of material will actually be a geoid, including the sun.
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?
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I'll believe it when I see it.
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-1 TMI :-)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Clearly, NASA likes Saturn...and Beyonce.
My sig has been answered.
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.
Here's a way to think about it. Jupiter weighs about 1000 times the Earth. The Sun weighs about a million times the Earth. A billion Earths is thus about a 1000 Solar masses. If you put that inside the solar system, there wouldn't be a solar system, at least, not for long.
always had a giant ring around it?
That would be Uranus.
All cows eat grass!
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.
Gotcha. The way I understood it, and the way it would make sense seeing as the first word is "angular," is the apparent size of a round object due to distortion from the angle you're viewing from. Cut a circular piece of construction paper, then turn it so you aren't looking at the flat surface directly.
Instead of this: O
You see this: 0 (I hope you're using the same font as me)
If angular diameter refers to the apparent size due to distance from the object.. it should be called apparent diameter. So above, my bad. But whoever coined the term is a moron.
Whale