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LOS ANGELES - Saturn's majestic ring system, visible through backyard telescopes, just got a little more crowded with the discovery of a faint, new ring encircling the giant planet, scientists said Tuesday. The international Cassini spacecraft beamed back images this week showing the new ring, located inside the outermost E ring. The new ring crosses the orbits of the Saturn moons Janus and Epimetheus, leading scientists to believe tiny particles from the lunar surfaces gave rise to the ring. Saturn has seven major rings named A through G, although they are not arrayed in alphabetical order. The planet has about...

The two moons discovered around Pluto last year were likely formed from the same giant impact that created the planet’s much larger satellite, Charon, scientists say. The idea suggests that other Kuiper Belt Objects might also harbor multiple satellites and raises the possibility that Pluto is encircled by rings fashioned from debris ejected from the surface of the tiny moons. The two moons, called P1 and P2 for now, were discovered in May 2005 using the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists now think the two moons are roughly 37 and 31 miles (60 and 50 km) in diameter. Charon has an...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- New observations by the international Cassini spacecraft reveal that Saturn's trademark shimmering rings, which have dazzled astronomers since Galileo's time, have dramatically changed over just the past 25 years. Among the most surprising findings is that parts of Saturn's innermost ring -- the D ring -- have grown dimmer since the Voyager spacecraft flew by the planet in 1981, and a piece of the D ring has moved 125 miles inward toward Saturn.

Astronomers have discovered 12 new moons orbiting Saturn, bringing its number of natural satellites to 46.The moons are small, irregular bodies - probably only about 3-7km in size - that are far from Saturn and take about two years to complete one orbit. All but one circles Saturn in the opposite direction to its larger moons - a characteristic of captured bodies. Jupiter is the planet with the most moons, 63 at the last count. Saturn now has 46. Uranus has 27 and Neptune 13. The latest ones were found last year using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. Confirmation...

from the January 29, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0129/p14s02-stss.html Another giant leapScientists around the world are eyeing the moon as a future research lab and a gateway to space exploration, while companies look at commercial prospects.By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor It's been dubbed Earth's attic, a keystone for understanding the early history of the inner planets, and even a potential safe-deposit box for evidence of life early in the solar system's history. By whatever label, the moon's star appears to be rising. Even before President Bush unveiled his space policy earlier this month,...

Scientists used to think that things were pretty chill over in the south hemisphere of Uranus. In fact, they thought it was one of the calmest regions of any of the gas giants. But in analyzing images taken nearly three decades ago by NASA's Voyager-2 spacecraft, researchers think they've found a kerfuffle of activity — which might indicate that there's something unusual about the planet's interior. If you look at these old photos of Uranus, the planet appears to be a stark, featureless ball. And even to scientists, who were able to identify more lively features of the gas giant,...

Revelation 6:14 Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. Everyone has seen pictures of the planet Saturn and its beautiful rings. Well, it is now known that many of our solar system's outer planets have rings. However, these rings are a problem for those astronomers who think that the universe is billions of years old. You see, the rings, which encircle the outer planets, would not be around today if the universe really was billions of years old. Recent studies of the rings of...

The planet Uranus reaches opposition on Saturday (Sept. 29). This means that Uranus is directly opposite the sun in the sky. Uranus rises will rise as the sun sets, and set as the sun rises. It will be highest in the sky at local midnight, roughly 1 a.m. if you are on Daylight Saving Time. Uranus was discovered accidentally by William Herschel on the night of March 13, 1781. All the other planets had been known since prehistoric times, so this was a major discovery in its time, and made Herschel famous.

For the first time, astronomers have snapped photos of auroras lighting up Uranus's icy atmosphere. Two fleeting, Earth-size auroral storms were imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope as they flared up on the dayside of the gas giant in November 2011. (See "Uranus Has a Bright New Spot, Picture Shows.") "The last time we had any definite signals of auroral activity on Uranus was when NASA's Voyager 2 probe swung by in 1986," said study leader Laurent Lamy, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France. "But this is the first time we can actually see these emissions...

If Uranus was not tilted in one blow, as is commonly thought, but rather was bumped in at least two smaller collisions, there is a much higher probability of seeing its moons orbit in the direction we observe. By European Planetary Science Congress, AAS Division for Planetary Science — Uranus’ highly tilted axis makes it something of an oddball in our solar system. The accepted wisdom is that Uranus was knocked on its side by a single large impact, but new research rewrites our theories of how Uranus became so tilted and also solves fresh mysteries about the position and...

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. The research, based on first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system..

Here is a trivia question: How many planets are visible without a telescope? Most will answer "five" (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Some might answer "six" and include the Earth in the mix. Six, in fact, is the correct number, but if you exclude our own world, there is indeed one other planet that can be spied without optical aid: the planet Uranus. This week will be a fine time to try and seek it out, especially since it is now favorably placed for viewing in our evening sky and the waxing moon is not overly bright. Of course,...

The rings of Uranus are oriented edge-on to Earth in 2007 for the first time since their 1977 discovery. This provides a rare opportunity to observe their dark (unlit) side, where dense rings darken to near invisibility, but faint rings become much brighter. We present a ground-based infrared image of the unlit side of the rings that shows that the system has changed dramatically since previous views. A broad cloud of faint material permeates the system, but is not correlated with the well-known narrow rings or with the embedded dust belts imaged by Voyager. Although some differences can be explained...

A tiny moon has been caught floating in front of Uranus for the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope reveals. The moon's shadow can also be seen on the planet's cloud tops, creating a solar eclipse on Uranus itself. Hubble imaged the event unexpectedly in July 2006, during a set of observations meant to study the planet's clouds. "When we first got this image back, we looked at it and said, 'What's that bright spot and that dark spot?'" says team member Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US. "We thought, it must be a problem...

Astronomers knew there was something odd going on when they looked for Uranus' newly discovered outer rings. For starters, they could only find one. After months of analysis, they figured out why: Unlike its red partner, the missing ring is so blue, it fell outside the telescope's range. "It's funny that this research got started by something we didn't see," said Imke de Pater, with the University of California at Berkeley and lead author of a paper describing the discovery in this week's journal Science. The initial discovery of a pair of outer rings circling Uranus was made by astronomers...

The Second Ring-Moon System of Uranus: Discovery and Dynamics Mark R. Showalter1* and Jack J. Lissauer2 Deep exposures of Uranus taken with the Hubble Space Telescope reveal two small moons and two faint rings. All of them orbit outside of Uranus's previously known (main) ring system but are interior to the large, classical moons. The outer new moon, U XXVI Mab, orbits at roughly twice the radius of the main rings and shares its orbit with a dust ring. The second moon, U XXVII Cupid, orbits just interior to the satellite Belinda. A second ring falls between the orbits of...

Hubble discovers new rings and moons around Uranus Washington: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new pair of rings around Uranus and two new small satellites orbiting the planet. The rings are very far away from the planet and the largest of them is twice the diameter of the planet's previously known rings. Astronomers are now calling them Uranus' second ring system. Also one of the new moons shares its orbit with one of the rings. The findings are to be published in the journal Science. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, program scientist for Hubble at NASA Headquarters said that analysis...

Telescope confirms likelihood of lunar collisions in 500,000 years Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have discovered two tiny new moons and two faint new rings spinning around the planet Uranus. The finds bring the current tallies for the remote blue world to more than two dozen moons and 13 rings. The scientists said Hubble images have also confirmed instabilities in the Uranian system that could eventually lead to lunar collisions. "The destruction and accumulation of moons and rings is very exciting," said Jack Lissauer of the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, a...

New orbital data on two moons of Uranus and two rings suggest the seventh planet may be a more chaotic place than thought. The two new moons, dubbed Cupid and Mab, were discovered in 2003 using the Hubble Space Telescope and archived images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, the moons' discoverers, Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute and Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center, both in California, US, have refined the orbits of the moons and spotted two previously undetected dust rings. “To me, the exciting part of this discovery is the fact that there were these...

Two more rings discovered around Uranus First additions to planet's ring system in nearly 20 years Updated: 2:03 p.m. ET Dec. 22, 2005 Astronomers aided by the Hubble Space Telescope have spied two more rings encircling Uranus, the first additions to the planet’s ring system in nearly two decades. The faint, dusty rings orbit outside of Uranus’ previously known rings, but within the orbits of its large moons, said Mark Showalter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who made the discovery. Details will appear on the journal Science's Web site, in advance of print publication. The...