Posted on 08/09/2009 11:11:26 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Deep in the outer realms of our solar system, well over a billion kilometers away, something bizarre happened at Saturn’s F ring.
I mean, seriously: what the he** happened here?
Cassini image of something punching through Saturn’s F ring
This is one of the latest pictures returned from the remarkable human achievement that is the Cassini spacecraft, a probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the ringed planet since 2004. It’s returned one incredible picture after another, and lately — as Saturn’s orbit has brought it to a point where the rings are nearly edge-on to the Sun — things have gotten not only spectacular but also really weird.
The rings are incredibly thin, only a few meters in thickness despite being hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. Over the past few months, as the Sun shines almost straight into the rings (instead of down on them), every bump and irregularity sticks out like, well, like a tree in the desert. Weird gravitational effects from Saturn’s fleet of moons tune and resonate the countless particles making up the rings, creating beautiful waves and ripples.
But this, this is something new. Zoom of Cassini image of something punching through Saturn’s F ring
It’s not exactly clear what’s going on here, even in this slightly zoomed shot. But it looks for all the world - or worlds — like some small object on an inclined orbit has punched through Saturn’s narrow F ring, bursting out from underneath, and dragging behind it a wake of particles from the rings. The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it’s casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what’s with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed in the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.
My first inclination (haha! Inclination! As always, I slay me) is to say that there isn’t enough material in the rings to create what amounts to a hydrodynamic wake behind a moving object. When you move through air you leave a wake behind you, but there are gazillions of particles per cubic centimeter in the Earth’s air at sea level. I would think that even in Saturn’s ring, the density of particles wouldn’t be enough to support a phenomenon like this.
But apparently, I’m wrong. Without doing a full-blown hydrodynamic calculation it’s hard to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Cassini scientists are currently doing just that, in order to better understand what this odd image is trying to tell us.
And I have to wonder: is this a common occurrence? Is this object on an orbit that intersects the rings so that it plunges up through them and then again down into them every time it circles Saturn? If so, how does that affect the rings overall, especially over millions of years?
Or was this a singular event, some small object whose orbit was affected by a nearby massive moon, changing its path, putting it on a collision course with Saturn’s mighty and vast ring system? That seems awfully unlikely…
… but when it comes to this weird, weird place, I’ve learned my intuition is monumentally inadequate. Nature, it turns out, has a far greater imagination than any mere human. We are fated, I think, to watch Nature unfold before us and try to figure it out after the fact.
But oh, isn’t that the joy of science?
cool! Now we get to watch as the rings reform themselves and if the “shephard” moonlets have anything to do with it
It used to be. Now, Al Gore will tell you the debate is over as he makes up the answer to his own question.
Whatever it is, it’s beautiful.
parsy, who has never driven a Saturn.
Which leave some kind of propellant exhaust or effect, eh? And either it happens all the time, or it was well aware of Cassini's camera at the gazillion-to-one moment the shutter clicked, and so wanted to be seen.
Oh, also, it would be interesting to note the size of the object - you can actually see Ring curvature in the photo, which would make the object, according to my calculations, what we in the biz call a big mofo.
Is there anyway to say how long ago this happened?
love Voyager, but that shot has always bugged me. With the reflection of Voyager on the rings, apparently that ship is larger than the Earth.
Phil Plait is a very arrogant liberal atheist who spent many posts bashing Sarah Palin and John McCain while praising Obama for being pro science. He finds every opportunity to bash Christians and anyone who believes in anything that science can’t prove (UFOs ghosts, god, faith healing, accupuncture etc)
OK
Maybe it’s something Microsoft-related.
My take is something crashed into ring material as it was passing through. This heated everything up creating a glowing trail that is casting a shadow.
One of the first really cool things to happen to me in college (er, that didn’t involve coeds or drinking), was in an Astronomy class I took my first semester. The prof took a bunch of us up to the observatory after class and let us look through the telescope. I got a really choice look at Saturn. Very cool stuff.
The article has a link to the Cassini Imaging website, which has the original photos plus a description, which says in part: "The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2009. ...Image scale is 3 miles per pixel."
Three miles per pixel! LOL! Like I said, it's a big mofo!
Well the shot represents a fictional extrasolar ringed planet. Who's to say how large it is...
Very big. and we can’t track something that big?
If it actually hit a bunch of material in the rings, it seems like it could take years for the F ring and neighboring rings to settle down again. It’s going to be very cool to see what astronomers have to say about it over the next few weeks.
Myself, being a reckless shoot-from-the-hip amateur astronomer wannabe, I think it’s a comet (it certainly looks like one) and may not have hit anything as it passed through the rings. Naturally, the tail of the comet points right at the Sun. So we know exactly where the Sun is positioned with respect to the scene and, no surprise, the shadow of the comet on the ring system is in perfect alignment with the tail. I’m having trouble figuring out whether that would necessarily be the case for a comet passing through the ring system at an arbitrary angle with sunshine coming in from any other artibrary angle... BUT, I know that for a non-comet blasting through the rings, generating a spray of ring material that it had collided with, we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see the path of the spray line up with the shadow.
Well, they'd tellya, but then they'd hafta killya. ; )
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