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?
lol
Comet? Not even the Cassini scientists are calling it a comet. And calling it's "projection" a comet tail and then using that to determine the orientation of the sun is putting the cart before the horse. Comet tails point away from the sun, not toward it, and the angle of the Rings in the shot is 30 degrees, with a clear shadow indicating some oblique angle with respect to the sun and the Rings.
Hyper footprint!
No, as I said, I’m calling it a comet. The “tail” points away from the Sun, but if you follow it in the other direction, it points toward the Sun. The dark line is a shadow (the article says that) and the bright part of the line is, according only to me, a comet’s tail. It may be a spray of material hit by the object as it passed through the rings and not a comet’s tail... We’ll see.
Blame it on Bush!
If it is a comet, it’s certainly showing its colors awfully far out in the solar system and ought to be a spectacular sight as it comes in closer. /wishful thinking by LW!
Okay, yes, a comet tail is aligned towards and away from the sun, agreed. As for the spray of material, it seems that’s what the article writer was puzzled about, since (though the reflections make a seemingly compacted ring of material), the ring seems actually too thin to create such a spray of material. I don’t know if the Cassini website pointed out this question as well, though I doubt he’d write about it for Discover magazine if they weren’t aware of the issue.
Punching through the F RingAha! Not a comet in all liklihood! That's what's good about my job as a reckless, amateur, astronomer wannabe... Nobody can fire me!Avg Rating: 9.47/10
This image, taken as Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, shows a shadow being cast by a narrow, vertically extended feature in the F ring.
Imaging scientists are working to understand the origin of structures such as this one, but they think this image may show the shadow of an object on an inclined orbit which has punched through the F ring and dragged material along in its path.
The second (bottom) version of the image has been brightened to enhance the visibility of the ring and shadow. Background stars appear elongated in the image because of the camera's exposure time.
This image and others like it (see PIA11663) are only possible around the time of Saturn's equinox which occurs every half-Saturn-year (equivalent to about 15 Earth years). The illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's angle to the ringplane and causes out-of-plane structures to cast long shadows across the rings. Cassini's cameras have spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn's moons (see PIA11657), but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves (see PIA11654).
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 866,000 kilometers (538,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Released: August 7, 2009 (PIA 11662) Image/Caption Information
No worries, mate. I too belong to the reckless, amateur, astronomer wannabe class, having many time set up telescopes solely for misidentification purposes, and buying incredibly expensive little tiny objects full of glass, only to peer through them and realize they weren't what I needed (thank God for return policies).
But it's worth it just for the times I looked through the scope and couldn't stop saying "wow"!
That Harry. Never could drive worth a damn.
He had to sit on a pile od data pads to see over the helm... :o)
Ring ping!
Just 2010 star baby playing with his toys. ;)
We’ve recently had another Jupiter collision - as large as those burn-points/clouds which came from the Shoemaker-Levy’s collision.
Now? Looks like Saturn got clobbered.
She can not be held accountable, if she didn't get the correct information.
Bush and Cheny’s Haliburton Hurricane Machine is out of control!
Great, just what we need now, baby elephants with hang gliders.
(Arthur C. Clarke)
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