Posted on 08/09/2009 11:11:26 PM PDT by LibWhacker
cool! Now we get to watch as the rings reform themselves and if the “shephard” moonlets have anything to do with it
It used to be. Now, Al Gore will tell you the debate is over as he makes up the answer to his own question.
Whatever it is, it’s beautiful.
parsy, who has never driven a Saturn.
Which leave some kind of propellant exhaust or effect, eh? And either it happens all the time, or it was well aware of Cassini's camera at the gazillion-to-one moment the shutter clicked, and so wanted to be seen.
Oh, also, it would be interesting to note the size of the object - you can actually see Ring curvature in the photo, which would make the object, according to my calculations, what we in the biz call a big mofo.
Is there anyway to say how long ago this happened?
love Voyager, but that shot has always bugged me. With the reflection of Voyager on the rings, apparently that ship is larger than the Earth.
Phil Plait is a very arrogant liberal atheist who spent many posts bashing Sarah Palin and John McCain while praising Obama for being pro science. He finds every opportunity to bash Christians and anyone who believes in anything that science can’t prove (UFOs ghosts, god, faith healing, accupuncture etc)
OK
Maybe it’s something Microsoft-related.
My take is something crashed into ring material as it was passing through. This heated everything up creating a glowing trail that is casting a shadow.
One of the first really cool things to happen to me in college (er, that didn’t involve coeds or drinking), was in an Astronomy class I took my first semester. The prof took a bunch of us up to the observatory after class and let us look through the telescope. I got a really choice look at Saturn. Very cool stuff.
The article has a link to the Cassini Imaging website, which has the original photos plus a description, which says in part: "The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2009. ...Image scale is 3 miles per pixel."
Three miles per pixel! LOL! Like I said, it's a big mofo!
Well the shot represents a fictional extrasolar ringed planet. Who's to say how large it is...
Very big. and we can’t track something that big?
If it actually hit a bunch of material in the rings, it seems like it could take years for the F ring and neighboring rings to settle down again. It’s going to be very cool to see what astronomers have to say about it over the next few weeks.
Myself, being a reckless shoot-from-the-hip amateur astronomer wannabe, I think it’s a comet (it certainly looks like one) and may not have hit anything as it passed through the rings. Naturally, the tail of the comet points right at the Sun. So we know exactly where the Sun is positioned with respect to the scene and, no surprise, the shadow of the comet on the ring system is in perfect alignment with the tail. I’m having trouble figuring out whether that would necessarily be the case for a comet passing through the ring system at an arbitrary angle with sunshine coming in from any other artibrary angle... BUT, I know that for a non-comet blasting through the rings, generating a spray of ring material that it had collided with, we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see the path of the spray line up with the shadow.
Well, they'd tellya, but then they'd hafta killya. ; )
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