NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn 255
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."
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)
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Because then you'd need to spend some $$$ on asteroid cream.
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...it wasn't a giant ring around Uranus.
No, but it is a dirty ring produced by irregular grinding. Sounds like the result of a diet lacking in fibre.
Re:Good thing... (Score:4, Funny)
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The rings [wikipedia.org] around Uranus were already discovered in 1977. And they are actually dirty (and icy).
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How is the Starship Enterprise like toilet paper?
They both circle Uranus and pick up Klingons.
Seriously, though, Uranus DOES have rings. =/
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But Uranus actually has a ring system [wikipedia.org].
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I thought it was Oor-uh-noes?
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"
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Anything you "discover" is previously unknown, by definition. Otherwise, the headline would have said "rediscover".
You pedants, when will you learn?
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Is anyone looking for these invisible rings in other places? Might Earth have one?
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.
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If we do, is it pink?
I want to have an invisible pink ring!
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Yes, but you have to know what an invisible ring looks like.
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How do you discovery something if you didn't previously know it was there?
The very statemen Discovers Rings MEANS it was previously unknown.
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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!
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.
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.
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Myself, I'd be kinda busy with trying to find some air, and quick. Wtf I was standing on would come in a distant second.
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Personally, I'd be more preoccupied with trying to breathe and not instantly freeze to death.
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.
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I know, but I posted it anyway to see how long it'd take for someone to correct me. ;)
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I know, but I posted it anyway to see how long it'd take for someone to correct me. ;)
And it took me a full 17 minutes! I gotta work on that, I'm sure I can shave it down to less 5. :)
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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)
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.
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.
You've perked my interest (Score:2)
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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
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].
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#
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IIRC, they're named in the order of discovery.
Re:Esoteric Naming System (Score:4, Informative)
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they will name him george.
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No! They shall call him Squishy, and he shall be theirs, he shall be their Squishy...
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E++ ?
Re:Esoteric Naming System (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, because the preparation for "H" feels good on the whole...
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Did you mean EBCDIC?
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That doesn't work, then you'd have
instead of
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.
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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.
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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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The moon orbits the earth, which happens to orbit the sun. The moon does not orbit the sun.
Lots of comets and asteroids orbit the sun, though.
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The moon orbits about the gravitational center of a system of n bodies. So does the earth, so does the sun, so does the galaxy.
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Orbit(v): "to move around (a heavenly body) in an orbit "
Orbit(n): "the curved path followed by something, such as a heavenly body or spacecraft, in its motion around another body"
Its path is curved, and it moves around the sun, thus the moon can be stated to be in orbit of the sun. It's not a useful definition (as truthfully the moon orbits another body which orbits the sun) but it is a true definition.
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By that definition, everything in the universe orbits everything else (from a relativistic point of view). As you said, not useful. To make it useful, we throw out all but the most significant gravitational influence and say the body orbits that.
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I can't see the moon, with no earth, going around in spirals while orbiting the sun... Unless the universe is a giant Spirograph [wikipedia.org].
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What? don't you believe in the crystal spheres? Sounds heretical to me. ;)
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Unless the universe is a giant Spirograph
Well, it sort of is anyway, but that's beside the point...
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The Moon, in it's orbit, never engages in spirals. In fact, its orbit (as seen from the Sun, or any outside point of reference) is always convex [nus.edu.sg].
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Stretched-out spirals are spirals nonetheless, even if they're stretched to the point they become convex.
Suppose you have a spinning lamp. This creates a spiral in the time dimension. You can see the spiral by panning a camera and taking a long-exposure photograph – that flattens the time dimension and shows you the spiral all at once.
If you don't pan the camera, you get a circle. This is merely a degenerate spiral. If you pan the camera fast enough (faster than the instantaneous velocity of the light
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)
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
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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!!!
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.
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How many libraries of Congress is that?
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Hi,
The quotes come from the Yahoo page. I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but this is not part of a peer reviewed research paper where only scientists are talking to scientists. Sometimes, speakers will target their language to the audience with which they are trying to communicate. Since the audience is likely going to be folks without a scientific background, the speaker will tailor his speech accordingly.
So in this instance, a U.S. based audience will want to hear Fahrenheit. They will also
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Scientists can convert to Fahrenheit, but having seen the billions of dollars this costs the USA in mistakes, they generally don't.
How do you determine edges? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wait a sec (Score:2)
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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Impacts [scientificamerican.com]. Stuff gets kicked up from Phoebe and accreted by Iapetus:
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The source of the two-faced Iapetus (Score:2)
This diffuse ring is likely the source of the "two-faced" Iapetus - the leading side of Iapetus is blackened [nasa.gov] 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 [nasa.gov] are hundreds of meters across. The ring may be braided (some of the others are), so
original source on Spitzer's web site (Score:2, Informative)
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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.
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Try reading that wikipedia page again. You're doing it wrong.
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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
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Yes. If you'd like to pose, I offer quite competitive rates.
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Small moon gets smashed by asteroids, becomes ring. News at 11.
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Doesn't mean the ring has the same orbit the moon had. And we can't see what escaped because it didn't became part of the ring.
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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!
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.
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You should have been watching the History Channel last Sunday, because they covered this. It's because Saturn is spinning. Notice that the planets all more or less line up in a plane around the sun? That the galaxy is lens shaped rather than round? Things that spin flatten out, and Saturn's gravity makes the rings part of Saturn.
All the outer planets have rings, and the dwarf Pluto might have one as well. Earth once had a ring when a Mars sized object slammed into it, and the ring became our moon.
The earth
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Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
I think they did!
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Volume. (Score:2)
It's in regard to earth volumes.
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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.
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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.