Posted on 12/23/2005 5:29:16 AM PST by msnimje
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 faint outer rings that previously escaped detection, says Richard French, an astronomer at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, US, who studies the dynamics of planetary rings.
The finds bring the number of Uranian moons to 27 and the rings to 12. Cupid orbits a mere 863 kilometres from a larger moon, Belinda, making them the solar systems closest pair of orbiting satellites that do not share the same orbit.
That really makes Cupid a sitting duck for being the next satellite of Uranus to disappear, Showalter told New Scientist. Only a tiny change in its orbit is needed for it to collide with Belinda, and that is possible within a million years.
~snip~
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientistspace.com ...
Uranus is big and gassy.
Ya know.......some jokes just write themselves.
HEY NOW!
there was that time Klingons invaded Uranus, but Capt. Kirk took care of 'em...
This article has a better title than a previous thread that is in Chat.
"Moongazing reveals the chaotic world of Uranus"
Must....
restrain --
it's....
almost....
Christmas.
Brings me back to elementary school and the gags about the "rings around Uranus"...
Or the classic, "What does Captain Kirk and Toilet Paper have in common?"
In the future as portrayed by "Futurama", the name of the planet Uranus was changed because astronomers got sick of the same old jokes.
The new name?
Urrectum.
"Pooper Held as Probe Widens"
Please don't disparage the nickname of my dear departed sister. Her full nickname was Pooperdinger, but we called her Pooper for short. True.
There was also Maxie, Teeny, and Bud. Sookie, Tiny and DonDon are still with us.
I (Rastus, nicknamed by Tiny) am the youngest, 13 years younger than Pooper was.
Scientists have discovered enormous eruptions of methane from Uranus.
I set up a DJ on a local radio station one day on that one. They were having a discussion of Romulans and Klingons. I called and said the Romulans come from Romulus and Klingons are on Uranus.
The lesson here is, never stare at a moon.
Will the spying never end?
(/moonbat mode)
(1997 - 1998) "In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to save the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told the bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital. Tomaszewski and his homosexual partner, Andrew "Kiki" Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong.
"I pushed a cardboard toilet paper tube up his rectum and slipped Ragout, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out 'Armageddon,' my cue that he'd had reached nirvana, so to speak. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he simply would not come out, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him."
At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman desribed what happened next.
"The match ignited a pocket of intestinal methane gas in Kiki's colon. Flames shot out the tube, ignited Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers, causing it to scurry further up Kiki's colon, which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out of the cardboard tube like a cannonball."
Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
Sadly, Ragout the gerbil did not survive the incident.
LOL - that's tearfully FUNNY!
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