Free Republic

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...

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 researchers report that they were studying the planet's rings, which are collectively called Eta, and discovered that they had an oddly shaped orbit -- not round or even circular. Instead, they describe it as sort of triangular. More study showed that the odd orbit of the rings was due to gravitational pull from Cressida -- one of the planet's moons. The gravitational impact is exaggerated, they note, due to the moon keeping pace with the orbit of the planet. The particles in the ring, on the other hand, move faster than the moon. This results in the moon tugging...