What does the new ring Iapetus have to do with Saturn?
Previously it was thought that the famous planet only had seven rings named A through to E and several faint unnamed rings. However Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope was able discover a new ring by picking up tiny particles of dust and ice using an infrared instrument. The ring is about 1.5 million miles thick and fifty times further out into space than Saturn’s other famous rings, making it bigger than any other ring previously studied in the Solar system. Until now the biggest known rings in the solar system were Saturn’s E ring. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that announced the discovery, said the ring was probably made up of debris kicked off Saturn’s moon Phoebe by small impacts. The telescope was able to pick up tiny particles of ring dust, that shine with thermal radiation from the Sun, by using an infrared instrument. A paper on the discovery has been published by the journal Nature. Anne Verbiscer, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and one of the authors of the
A huge ring of dust has been discovered around Saturn that is about 50 times farther out into space than the planet’s known rings. The faint hoop, the largest-known planetary ring in the Solar System, is believed to be made up of debris from one of Saturn’s moons, Phoebe. According to the study, published tomorrow in the journal Nature, this dust is disturbed by minor impacts on Phoebe and drifts towards the planet where it is picked up by another of Saturn’s moons, Iapetus. The dusty hoop extends about 8 million miles (13 million km) from the planet, and would be twice the size of the full Moon if it were visible from the Earth, Previously, the largest-known planetary rings were Jupiter’s gossamer rings and Saturn’s E ring — broad sheets of dust that extend to about 0five to ten times the radius of their planets. The new ring is extremely faint, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. In a cubic kilometre of space there are only about 20 particles. “It’s very very tenuous.
They think this dust then migrates towards the planet where it is picked up by another Saturnian moon, Iapetus. The discovery would appear to resolve a … Sources: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_0_0_t&usg=AFQjCNHZFFEiO90xaFJhmfNPcjwm8SMA2A&sig2=Z3rO5UTHWg8KpQT6xLmtLg&cid=1446726978&ei=R4zMSqiuCILK8ASI0J6sAg&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F2%2Fhi%2Fscience%2Fnature%2F8291905.
