Super Ring Dwarfs Saturnian System

October 07, 2009

Though NASA’s Cassini orbiter has been surveying Saturn and its moons in stunning detail for the past five years, it missed -- not surprisingly -- the 800-pound gorilla in the Saturnian system. 

Infrared astronomers announced yesterday the discovery of a huge puffy and tenuous ring of ice and dust encircling Saturn well beyond the orbits of most of its satellites.

The ghostly ring is way too faint to be seen with optical telescopes. It took the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to pick up the telltale glow of warm dust in the ring. The ring sets a new record as the largest structure seen around any planet.

Rather that being isolated to a comparatively paper-thin ring plane. The new ring is as thick as 20 Saturn diameters, making the structure more inner tube like. The super-sized ring extends from 3.7 to 7.4 million miles from Saturn. This makes the classic ring system that huddles close to the planet look Lilliputian.

The distant moon Phoebe circles Saturn just within the newfound ring and is likely the source of dust that fills the ring.  The dust is blasted off Phoebe by collisions with comets. Satellite-fed rings have been previously found around Uranus and Jupiter.

The ring is tilted 27 degrees from Saturn’s main ring plane, and aligns with the tilt of Phoebe’s orbit.  The ring also rotates backwards relative to the orbits of the major Saturnian moons. This makes sense because Phoebe is likely a gravitationally captured object in a retrograde orbit about Saturn.

Black dust migrating away from the ring has likely coated one hemisphere of Saturn’s strange two-toned moon Iapetus. The leading hemisphere of the satellite is charcoal black and the trailing hemisphere is snow white. 

It has long been though that Iapetus must have plowed through a dust cloud, like a car windshield coated with bugs. Now at last the source of the dust has been found.

Though Saturn is a pinpoint of light as seen from Earth, the mongo ring if it were visible would be seen spanning one degree of sky – which is the width of your forefinger held at arm’s length, or two full moon diameters. 

In 1609 Galileo was flustered by the “cup handle” appearance of Saturn when he turned the newly invented telescope toward it.  His telescope was too small to resolve the visible ring structure. Now 400 years later the most opulent planet in the solar system still has hidden secrets to uncover. 

Comments

[Ed Weibe]

I wonder if MARS has such a belt?

[Less1leg]

With all this hoopla, let's get down to the brass tacks here.
Many planetary surprise results have some to do with telescopes, but more to do with inter-planetary heat sources impacting these planets and moons.
Latent heat travelling from our sun is impacting these sites and is causing new changes that can only be attributed to heat transfer. Its the same heat source and heat transfer that is affecting our planet.
But unfortunately our progressive liberals have to tie that on man-made sources its easier to extract payments from or socially engineer. What are good liberals for, ideal time and way out conspiracy theory stuff.
If our planetary telescopes are telling us something it will be short lived. Our sun's heat just like a tide will pull back and remove these wonderful changes that we are now experiencing.
And no, Al Gore can't peg a hockey stick theory on the other planets nor blame man and its carbon dioxides.

[alan]

thats a good point... for all we know earth could have a ring

[Hud]

Less1leg - I'm sorry, but I don't see where anyone has ever tried to tie Climate change, or Global warming to changes we see in space. These are local problems with local causes, and have absolutely nothing to do with any liberal agenda.
The info you shared about heat transfer are likely very valid, but I fail to see your point.

[Don]

Very interesting discovery from Spitzer. I'd like to point out that the dust is not actually 'warm' as we would use that term on Earth; rather, the dust in the ring is cool, but warmer than the incredible cold of the surrounding space.

For Alan, Cosmic Ray wrote a cool piece in September 2008 about the possibility that long ago Earth had a dust ring like Saturn.

[Chris Brown]

I think this is crazy people should really find something to do with there time...

[D. Wolken]

"I don't see where anyone has ever tried to tie Climate change, or Global warming to changes we see in space."

Then it's time to read up, Hud! Here you go.

Galactic Rays Cause Climate Change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpDDqGqN16s

The Chilling Stars:
http://current.com/items/89732308

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1qGOUIRac0

Plus, you should read anything you can get your hands on by Vladimir I. Vernadsky.

[Nancy Fletcher]

You might consider studying English with yours. It is "their" not "there," although somehow your competence and your comment seem related.

[Is nowhere safe from politics?]

This is not a new change in the Saturnian system, just a new discovery. I'm sorry, but you simply can't tie this one to climate change, whichever side of the fence you sit.

[Dave Ebert]

Some odd comments here. I know climate change is a hot button now, but coming out for or against cosmic evidence of terrestrial climate change is just silly. Planetary science is in its infancy. At the moment, the best evidence we have of anything extraterrestrial is more or less anecdotal. How can you argue about the politics of global warming tied to extraplanetary exploration? It's stupid.
We haven't been anywhere except the Moon, and we didn't even know what questions to ask when we were there. It's too bad we wasted so many trips to the Moon for cold war propaganda before we had better research objectives. I hope we don't waste a trip to Mars with such shortsighted goals. Hopefully before we invest the terrible cost of risking human lives on a Mars mission, we will have exhausted the objectives that can be met using robot rovers. We're nowhere near that, yet. We can design all kinds of interesting probes that will answer a lot of questions before we go there in person. Frankly, barring evidence of life, it might behoove us to bypass Mars permanently and go on to Titan or Europa first. We know there are oceans there, and might have a better chance of finding some sort of complex life, not to mention a chance for a future human habitat. If there is no life on Titan, we could dump in a ton of assorted marine life, and see what happens!

[Dave Ebert]

I wonder if there are paid propagandists that cruise science blogs, looking for places to insert anti-climate-change-science commentary? I know they do that on political blogs on issues like "death panels" and "birther" race baiting, and creationist hogswallow. I'm interested to see similar stupidity appearing here.

[Dave]

Less-for the sake of your argument work on the english. Hud-You are in space and just because Less has bad grammar doesn't change the meaning behind the message. In plain english I believe he/she was saying that we should turn our attention to extra-planetary sources for our current "global warming" crisis. Wolken, great post. Everyone, keep it scientific and leave the name-calling and finger pointing at home. Let's be objective here. Afterall, we are discussing a scientific phenomenon. Frankly, there is no room for politics. That being said, yes, Al Gore should stick to banning music. Long live Dee Snyder.

[Constant Gina]

There is so much more in the universe I would love to find out more about..!!!

[Coriantumr]

We do not know enough to tie climate change [which is really happening] to more radiation fom the sun. We just happen to have more and better eyes today than 20 years ago. Now, if climate is changing.........less debate, more talk about solutions, plan "b" kinda talk? Who cares about Gore?

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