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The concept that Saturn's rings are made up of a series of tiny ringlets can be traced to Pierre-Simon Laplace, [4] although true gaps are few – it is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk with concentric local maxima and minima in density and brightness. [2] On the scale of the clumps within the rings there is much empty space.
Larger rocks and boulders may also be present, and in 2007 tidal effects from eight moonlets only a few hundred meters across were detected within Saturn's rings. The maximum size of a ring particle is determined by the specific strength of the material it is made of, its density, and the tidal force at its altitude. The tidal force is ...
Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo's discoveries by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn. [14] Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four more moons of Saturn and the Cassini division in Saturn's rings. [15] The Sun photographed through a telescope with special solar filter.
Saturn's rings are made up of billions of chunks of ice and rock ranging from the size of a grain of sand to as large as a mountain, according to NASA. They're thought to be created by comets ...
Peggy is the informal name for a former moonlet in the outermost part of Saturn's Ring A, orbiting 136,775 kilometres (84,988 mi) away from the planet. The moonlet was discovered by the Cassini Imaging Team in 2013 and it may likely be exiting Saturn's A Ring. [1] No direct image of Peggy has ever been made. [4]
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastThe rings of Saturn are one of the most iconic structures in the solar system. Composed of billions of tiny chunks of ice and rock that are as ...
Earth may have had a ring made up of a broken asteroid over 400 million years ago, a study finds. The Saturn-like feature could explain a climate shift at the time.
[18] [36] Its faint apparent magnitude (H V = +11.7) and its proximity to the much brighter Saturn and Saturn's rings make Enceladus difficult to observe from Earth with smaller telescopes. Like many satellites of Saturn discovered prior to the Space Age, Enceladus was first observed during a Saturnian equinox, when Earth is within the ring plane.