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Saturn's Moons Built From Ring Material

Posted by CmdrTaco on Fri Dec 07, 2007 09:04 AM
from the lookit-all-them-moons-up-there dept.
Space
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."
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Submission: Saturn's moons built from ring material by LiquidCoooled (634315)
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  • Actually relevant (Score:4, Informative)

    by explosivejared (1186049) <hagan@jared.gmail@com> on Friday December 07 2007, @09:06AM (#21611585)
    Wow, the "that's no moon" comments actually have some relevance now, as one can say "that's not moon... it's aggregated ring material that only looks like a moon!"

    • Re:Actually relevant (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ByOhTek (1181381) on Friday December 07 2007, @09:15AM (#21611685) Journal
      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.
      • The earth isn't a planet, it's aggregated stellar dust that looks like a planet! Which Star Wars was that one from? See I find Science hard so I have to orient it around things I do understand, like science fiction. See I didn't understand just how devastating being left out unprotected in space could be, you know black body radiation and lack of oxygen, until I read the Hitchhiker's Guide. I also didn't understand the dangers of a robot killing frenzy (a proven scientific fact!) until I read Asimov. So unt
      • Our moon isn't aggregated dust, it's a chuck of Earth that was knocked off by an impact with something early in the life of the planet.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ByOhTek (1181381)
          If it came from a chunk of aggregated dust, doesnt that just make it a slightly more modified chunk of aggregated dust?
        • Bravo..no really...pounding the anti-Bush rhetoric into a completely unrelated thread is awesome...

          Okay, Folks, I'll hold him down, someone get his medication ready.

    • Wow, the "that's no moon" comments actually have some relevance now, as one can say "that's not moon... it's aggregated ring material that only looks like a moon!"

      Yeah, but how would it sound with Alex Guiness saying it?

  • By god, right? How about a better word, like 'consists?'

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ByOhTek (1181381)
      Built is a perfectly appropriate word. Consists simply tells what something is made of, built tells how. Since it didn't spontaneously pop into existence, built works fine.
      • -1 troll is bullcrap. The comment was never intended to be a troll (and yeah I'll happily burn some karma on this.) Just because you disagree with someones world view is no reason to mod them -1 troll.

  • Ring Material (Score:4, Funny)

    by CaseyB (1105) on Friday December 07 2007, @09:08AM (#21611601)
    Saturn's moons are made of Scrith?

  • Or Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nhstar (452291) on Friday December 07 2007, @09:10AM (#21611643)
    Saturn's Rings are made of moon material? Is this chick or egg?
    • FYI:

      The egg came before the chicken. That's just how evolution works. A non-chicken did not have all its DNA mutate mid-life turning it into a chicken. Instead, the zygote of the first chicken had all it's DNA intact at conception, passed along from two parents that were not quite chickens.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Wellspring (111524)
        Does the mother create the egg? Or does it self-generate?

        This is actually a semiserious question

  • Too much to ask? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kintar1900 (901219) on Friday December 07 2007, @09:19AM (#21611721) Homepage

    Is it too much to ask that New Scientist stop using crappy CGI and start posting some of the actual photographs that the astronomers used to form their theories?

  • That moon with the big wall on it (can't remember which planet it orbits)- could it have a similar explanation? That is, an already-formed moon runs through a very thin ring for a couple of centuries, accumulating the ring material in one big long pile that ends up looking like a wall?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tejin (818001)
      The moon is Iapetus. It has a walnut shape and a massive equatoral wall. It's a possible explanation, though Iapetus orbits outside the ring system, and off-plane.

      Then again there could be a 'black ring' further out which explains the two-tone colouring of the moon and the equatoral wall. The only problem is that we haven't detected and rings out there.

      • In short, no, we don't think that this mechanism explains Iapetus. Best guess there is that you have some tectonic effect due to its thermal history. There are some recent papers out there on the topic, although I'm very familiar with the details.
  • Fourteen posts and no "That's no moon..." jokes yet?

    Chris Mattern
  • Aren't the rings bashed up/unformed moons anyhow?

    • Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)

      by CheshireCatCO (185193) on Friday December 07 2007, @10:44AM (#21612831) Homepage
      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.
  • . . . now that's a cool concept. Geeky, but cool.
  • I thought it was obvious that the numerous moons of Saturn came about as a result of collections within the rings. That is why you see gaps in and around the orbits of the moons.
  • The Bush government has taken a strong anti-'Ring Material' stance. Bush was quoted as saying "Everyone knows all moons are made of cheese."

    The Homeland Security Department released a memo this morning citing the Moons of Saturn for "...devious and unnatural behaviour..." and warned that their actions could be taken as "...preliminary build-up for a terrorist strike against the hard working dairy providers of America."

    Osama Bin Ladin also released a tape stating that the Koran clearing shows that "...all mo

  • Oh man, who would have thought! A source of scrith in our own solar system!

    Guys, I wasn't so sure about getting into a space race with China, but now I know we need to get there first. Anyone know how close we are to an actual cziltang brone?

  • Real Images of Pan and Atlas (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2007, @10:15AM (#21612397)
    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2865 [nasa.gov] //and congratulations to New Scientist for the most annoying holiday ad ever.
  • Astronomers have determined that the shape of the satellite determines whether it is classified as a moon or not. In an astounding landslide at the latest meeting, it was declared that saucer shaped satellites are to be labeled actual moons, while the spherical satellites are now called pseudo-moons. This in a new spree of reclassifications by astronomers has confused many people.

  • 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.
    The dominating theory as to how the moon of Earth formed was a method much like this. The Earth actually had rings from a giant impact at one time and they all condensed into one big mass that we know and love as Luna.

    • One moon to rule them all

      One moon to find them

      One moon to bring them all into the darkness

      and bind them!

      The problem is the ring overshadows the moon.

    • In as much as it was previously thought that the moons *couldn't* grow in the ring-region (what with tides), I'm a little curious as to how come you think their grown is obvious.
    • They're not packed very tightly, in as much as the densities are around half that of liquid water.

      They're not compressed. They are probably sintered together thanks to repeated exposures to sunlight and then dipping into the planet's shadow, although the details of that we did not work out.
      • Gravitational forces are way too weak. On the surfaces of these guys, the escape speed is (literally) zero thanks to tidal and centrifugal forces.

        They aren't compressed at all. That's why the densities are so incredibly low.
    • Speaking as a ring scientist, I don't actually know of any other real contending theories for the origin of the rings. This isn't to say that we have the story all figured out, but as far as I've ever heard, people seem pretty comfortable with the break-up model. (For one thing, it's stochastic and therefore would reasonably explain why only Saturn has a really massive ring system.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by CheshireCatCO (185193)
      Because he did the research and, more importantly, put the movie together.

      Honestly, Sebastien's English is so much better than my French, I would never complain.

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