Seeing the Shadow of Rings around a “Super Saturn”
نویسنده
چکیده
Astronomers think they have found a planet that has a giant set of rings around it, over 200 times larger than the rings around the planet Saturn. The planet is young enough that moons may be forming out of the material of the rings, and we are seeing the shadows of the rings here on Earth. We are now looking for other planets that have giant rings around them, and we may see rings in 2017 around the planet beta Pictoris b.
منابع مشابه
Horsing around on Saturn.
On the basis of simple statistical mechanical models, the prevailing view of the rings of Saturn is that they are unstable and must therefore have been formed rather recently. In this paper, we argue that the Saturn rings and inner moons are in much more stable orbits than previously thought and, therefore, that they likely formed together as part of the initial formation of the solar system. T...
متن کاملVoyager 1 at Saturn An Encounter with a Multi - ringed Giant
1e Voyager project, a national enterprise involving several thousand individuals who built the spacecraft, several hundred at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who fly it, and approximately a hundred scientists who are analyzing the data, began, in a sense, with one man and his telescope. In 1610 Galileo turned that telescope toward Saturn and observed some odd appendages, somewhat like cup h...
متن کاملThe allure of the ringed planets
One of the most enduring symbols of space exploration is a planet surrounded by a ring. This symbol inspires a celestial context: nothing on Earth is like it. My own fascination with space began when first I saw Saturn and its rings through a small telescope. The study of planets and rings has become my lifelong vocation. What a wonderful surprise that the ringed planets are just as beautiful a...
متن کاملWhy Are Dense Planetary Rings Only Found between 8 and 20au?
The recent discovery of dense rings around the Centaur Chariklo (and possibly Chiron) reveals that complete dense planetary rings are not only found around Saturn and Uranus, but also around small bodies orbiting in the vicinity of those giant planets. This report examines whether or not there could be a physical process that would make rings more likely to form or persist in this particular pa...
متن کاملToroidal Atmospheres around Extrasolar Planets
Jupiter and Saturn have extended, nearly toroidal atmospheres composed of material ejected from their moons or rings. Here we suggest that similar atmospheres must exist around giant extrasolar planets and might be observable in a transit of the parent star. Observation of such an atmosphere would be a marker for the presence of orbiting debris in the form of rings or moons that might otherwise...
متن کامل