New Moon Found In Saturn's G-Ring 102
caffiend666 writes "Scientists have announced a new moon has been found hidden in the G Ring of Saturn. The discovery was announced Tuesday in a notice by the International Astronomical Union. This is one of over five dozen moons, and is only a third of a mile wide. No word yet on a name for the new moon; I vote Cowboy Neal."
G-ring? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A third of a mile makes it a moon? (Score:5, Informative)
Well since the majority of that "other stuff" is dust or ice crystals, some being maybe as large as a few meters, and the rings themselves are only about 10m thick, then yeah something a third of a mile wide stands out pretty significantly. They're sometimes called "moonlets" to denote the fact that they are, by moon standards, pretty small.
Re:A third of a mile makes it a moon? (Score:4, Informative)
Can you really call an object a third of a mile wide a "moon" rather than "just a rocky piece of junk that orbits Saturn, like a whole bunch of other stuff."
There's about 150 of those in Saturn's system alone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_satellite [wikipedia.org]
However, nobody can find a good definition of a moon, just like the definition of the planet was hard to come by. The "cleared it's orbit" clause won't work for moons because they are the sources of the gas giant's rings (and gravitationally stabilize them), and the "gravitationally round" bit won't work either because it would eliminate lots of objects that we would like to call moons, such as the two rocks orbiting Mars. Come up with a good definition that does not rely on any arbitrary numbers (like size, mass, etc), and I'll submit it for approval.