The Carnival of Space 124 is up at “We are all in the gutter”
Discovery Space news reports that the Spitzer telescope has detected a very large dust ring around Saturn Rather that being isolated to a comparatively paper-thin ring plane. The new ring is as thick as 20 Saturn diameters, making the structure more inner tube like. The super-sized ring extends from 3.7 to 7.4 million miles from Saturn
Just how big is this ring? “If you had infrared eyes like Spitzer,” said Anne Verbiscer, research astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, “from Earth, it would look like one full moon on either side of Saturn.” That’s incredibly huge! The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). A billion Earths could fit in the volume of space this ring occupies.
If you were standing inside the ring you wouldn’t even know it. In a cubic kilometer of space there are only 10-20 particles. The particles are about the same size as fog particles, but they are very spread out.
Check out the Carnival of Space 124 at “We are all in the gutter” for a lot more
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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