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Giant Propellers Discovered In Saturn's Rings
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PLEASE READ ARTICLE FOR EVALUATION OF THE PHENOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:satprops:
Giant Propellers Discovered In Saturn's Rings
By Denise Chow
SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 08 July 2010
03:43 pm ET
[link to www.space.com]
:satproclos:
Giant propeller-shaped structures have been discovered in the rings of Saturn and appear to be created by a new class of hidden moons, NASA announced Thursday.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft spotted the distinctive structures inside some of Saturn's rings, marking the first time scientists have managed to track the orbits of individual objects from within a debris disk like the one that makes up Saturn's complicated ring system.
"Observing the motions of these disk-embedded objects provides a rare opportunity to gauge how the planets grew from, and interacted with, the disk of material surrounding the early sun," said the study's co-author Carolyn Porco, one of the lead researchers on the Cassini imaging team based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "It allows us a glimpse into how the solar system ended up looking the way it does."
Photos of the propellers taken by Cassini show them to be huge structures several thousands of miles long. By understanding how they form, astronomers hope to glean insight into the debris disks around other stars as well, researchers said.
The results of the study are detailed in the July 8 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Propellers at Saturn
Cassini scientists have seen double-armed propeller structures in Saturn's rings before, but on a smaller scale than the larger, newfound features. They were first spotted in 2006 in an area now known as the "propeller belt," which is located in the middle of Saturn's outermost dense ring – the A ring.
The propellers are actually gaps in the ring material were created by a new class of objects, called moonlets, that are smaller than known moons but larger than the particles making up Saturn's rings. It is estimated that these moonlets could number in the millions, according to Cassini scientists.
The moonlets clear the space immediately around them to generate the propeller-like features, but are not large enough to sweep clear their entire orbit around Saturn, as seen with the moons Pan and Daphnis. [Photos of Saturn rings and moons.]
But in the new study, researchers a new legion of larger and rarer moons in a separate part of the A ring, farther out from Saturn. These much larger moons create propellers that are hundreds of times larger than those previously described, and these objects have been tracked for about four years.
The study was led by Cassini imaging team associate Matthew Tiscareno at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
The propeller features for these larger moons are up to thousands of miles long and several miles wide. The moons embedded in Saturn's rings appear to kick up ring material as high as 1,600 feet (0.5 km) above and below the ring plane.
This is much greater than the typical ring thickness of about 30 feet (10 meters), researchers said.
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