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."
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.
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'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.
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.
It is astonishing how little we know about the non-radiating matter in our own solar system. For example, the size of the Oort cloud is not really known. We can see active galactic nuclei up to z=6.4 or 5.4 Gpc, but don't know the objects within 0.04 parsecs of earth yet. The sphere is a beast.
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 [wikipedia.org] can keep things hot for a really long time.
More so, to OPEN YOUR MOUTH when decompressing. And keep your mouth extremely dry! Because else, the pressure in your lungs will blast you. And the water in your mouth (essentially the athmosphere you talked about) will freeze to stone. But afterwards, you can easily survive for 30 seconds. Your skin will just begin to swell. But return to normal once inside again.
The biggest problem would rather be radiation, and of course the breathing. But I can hold my breath for two minutes. So I'd actually not be *that*
Losing heat by radiation is only slow when there's lots of stuff around you radiating back. According to this [kilty.com] 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.
It's a very faint ring, more like a thin cloud. Voyager was generally not designed to study something that thin, unless perhaps they knew specifically what to look for, such as a specific wavelength. Plus, when you are "in" it, it's hard to have something to compare to know that there's a difference. You cannot rule out instrument contamination or noise when it's almost equal in all directions.
As others have pointed out, the issue was with luminosity, not being too small to see.
In fact, these rings are SO big that being close probably makes them even harder to see.
Consider that we know exactly what the shape of the Andromeda galaxy is, but we only have a general knowledge of the shape of our own galaxy. Or, consider that a person in a hedge maze might need an hour or two to accurately map it, but somebody flying overhead would just have to snap a photo.
On the topic of Andromeda - that galaxy is actually similar to the size of the moon in the sky (maybe bigger). However, it is too dim to see with the naked eye (maybe just a splotch in a very dark sky). A simple camera can get a decent shot of it given a long enough exposure time.
The other post had some good tips. Note that strictly speaking you don't need a tracking telescope. You can take a bunch of 10s exposures with a half-decent camera and then overlay them to get a better image. There is software out there that will do this semi-automatically (google for stacking), or you can just use Photoshop.
Don't expect to get something like what you'd see out of the Hubble. In my light-polluted area (suburban), with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, I was able to get a small hazy disc with a central
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?
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.
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 [wired.com] with a DSLR.
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.
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.
Gravitational pull by Saturn at a distance of 7.4 million miles: ~0.275 mm/s^2.
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.)
Yes. The BBC article [bbc.co.uk] 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.
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.
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
Although the ring dust is very cold -- minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit -- it shines with thermal radiation.
That's -193'C or 80 K if you're an actual scientist.
The bulk of the ring material starts about 3.7 million miles from the planet and extends outward about another 7.4 million miles.
...has an inner radius of 5.9 million kilometers and extends to 17 million km.
>The newly found ring is so huge it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it
That's "so huge it would take 1.03×10^29 Volkswagens to fill it"
JPL said
JPL is a collection of buildings in California and does not speak. Perhaps the Oracle of JPL made this prophecy?
"This is one supersized ring," said one of the authors, Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
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.
The angular diameter or apparent size of an object as seen from a given position is the âoevisual diameterâ of the object measured as an angle.
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 [gstatic.com]. The bird is close to the viewer (appearing large) and the moon very far away (appearing small). Although we know it's
...and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane,...
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!
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?
Impacts [scientificamerican.com]. Stuff gets kicked up from Phoebe and accreted by Iapetus:
The study's authors speculate that meteoric impacts on Phoebe's dark, heavily cratered surface liberate the particles that form the ring. That assertion might explain the anomalously two-toned surface of Iapetus, a Saturnian moon inside Phoebe's orbit. The smaller particles of the Phoebe-generated ring should migrate inward, where they would eventually be sw
Well, there's also this [nasa.gov]... if I'm reading the description correctly, it's the Spitzer infrared picture, with an enhanced inset plus an inset photo of Saturn taken by the Hubble.
Good thing... (Score:5, Funny)
...it wasn't a giant ring around Uranus.
Yeah, yeah, just thought I'd get that out of the way early.
Re:Good thing... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because then you'd need to spend some $$$ on asteroid cream.
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But Uranus actually has a ring system [wikipedia.org].
Re:Good thing... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Whats funny is my initial reaction to the headline (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Whats funny is my initial reaction to the headl (Score:5, Insightful)
A better headline would've been, "NASA Discovers Previously Unknown Ring Around Saturn"
Parent
Re:Whats funny is my initial reaction to the headl (Score:5, Funny)
Is anyone looking for these invisible rings in other places?
Yes. Fools that they are.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Missed by Voyager? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is astonishing how little we know about the non-radiating matter in our own solar system. For example, the size of the Oort cloud is not really known.
We can see active galactic nuclei up to z=6.4 or 5.4 Gpc, but don't know the objects within 0.04 parsecs of earth yet.
The sphere is a beast.
Parent
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] can keep things hot for a really long time.
So yeah, breathing would be your concern.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More so, to OPEN YOUR MOUTH when decompressing. And keep your mouth extremely dry!
Because else, the pressure in your lungs will blast you. And the water in your mouth (essentially the athmosphere you talked about) will freeze to stone.
But afterwards, you can easily survive for 30 seconds. Your skin will just begin to swell. But return to normal once inside again.
The biggest problem would rather be radiation, and of course the breathing. But I can hold my breath for two minutes. So I'd actually not be *that*
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a very faint ring, more like a thin cloud. Voyager was generally not designed to study something that thin, unless perhaps they knew specifically what to look for, such as a specific wavelength. Plus, when you are "in" it, it's hard to have something to compare to know that there's a difference. You cannot rule out instrument contamination or noise when it's almost equal in all directions.
Parent
Re:Missed by Voyager? (Score:5, Interesting)
As others have pointed out, the issue was with luminosity, not being too small to see.
In fact, these rings are SO big that being close probably makes them even harder to see.
Consider that we know exactly what the shape of the Andromeda galaxy is, but we only have a general knowledge of the shape of our own galaxy. Or, consider that a person in a hedge maze might need an hour or two to accurately map it, but somebody flying overhead would just have to snap a photo.
On the topic of Andromeda - that galaxy is actually similar to the size of the moon in the sky (maybe bigger). However, it is too dim to see with the naked eye (maybe just a splotch in a very dark sky). A simple camera can get a decent shot of it given a long enough exposure time.
Parent
Size of Andromeda (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [nasa.gov].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The other post had some good tips. Note that strictly speaking you don't need a tracking telescope. You can take a bunch of 10s exposures with a half-decent camera and then overlay them to get a better image. There is software out there that will do this semi-automatically (google for stacking), or you can just use Photoshop.
Don't expect to get something like what you'd see out of the Hubble. In my light-polluted area (suburban), with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, I was able to get a small hazy disc with a central
Esoteric Naming System (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Wonder what they will name this one, anyone good with sequence puzzles?
The next one will clearly be I.
Re:Esoteric Naming System (Score:5, Funny)
Wonder what they will name this one, anyone good with sequence puzzles?
D#
Parent
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IIRC, they're named in the order of discovery.
Re:Esoteric Naming System (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
E++ ?
Re:Esoteric Naming System (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, because the preparation for "H" feels good on the whole...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Did you mean EBCDIC?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No! They shall call him Squishy, and he shall be theirs, he shall be their Squishy...
Cool Dust (Score:5, Funny)
Infrared (Score:2, Interesting)
What a shame. It would be really cool to capture it [wired.com] with a DSLR.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's also just too dim, in addition to being in the infrared spectrum.
Just now? (Score:2, Funny)
NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn
They figured it out just now?
This proves it. The moon landings were fake.
Well (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Gravitational pull by Saturn at a distance of 7.4 million miles: ~0.275 mm/s^2.
Gravitational pull by Sol at the nearest po
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Iapetus? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Iapetus? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Yeah, but (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Saturn is married (Score:2)
One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
I now pronounce you man and wife.
Re:Saturn is polygamous (Score:3, Informative)
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
Is it bad science day already? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How many libraries of Congress is that?
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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 [gstatic.com]. The bird is close to the viewer (appearing large) and the moon very far away (appearing small). Although we know it's
Re: (Score:2)
Small moon gets smashed by asteroids, becomes ring. News at 11.
Re: (Score:2)
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!
One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
I think that's why.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
I think they did!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Impacts [scientificamerican.com]. Stuff gets kicked up from Phoebe and accreted by Iapetus:
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Well, there's also this [nasa.gov] ... if I'm reading the description correctly, it's the Spitzer infrared picture, with an enhanced inset plus an inset photo of Saturn taken by the Hubble.