Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Does Saturn have a new moon?


This was kind of interesting, but I didn't have a chance to get to it for awhile.  Recent observations indicate that Saturn's complex ring system may have sprouted a proto-moon, or a moonlet, or just simply a tight little clump of ring material.

In any case, they've called it "Peggy".  And it's not clear if it is even there anymore.  I don't find this surprisng, since there's a lot of stuff floating around in the rings, and I wouldn't think it would have a distribution of uniform density.  But it is interesting to see a clump, since this in smaller scale is how astronomers think the planets formed around our proto-Sun.

Cassini spies mysterious Saturn object named 'Peggy'


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