NASA telescope discovers giant ring around Saturn

[dragon04]

The Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered the biggest but never-before-seen ring around the planet Saturn, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced late Tuesday.

The thin array of ice and dust particles lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane, the laboratory said.

JPL spokeswoman Whitney Clavin said the ring is very diffuse and doesn't reflect much visible light but the infrared Spitzer telescope was able to detect it.

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[h2ouniverse]

Splendid

Explains too the darkened face of the heading hemisphere of "I, a Petus".

 

[R1]

The artist rendering from dragon's link.

 

[R1]

Have they looked at Jupiter in the same light yet, I wonder?

 

[CommonMan]

Why didn’t the satellites we sent there find this ring?

 

[MeteorWayne]

It's too diffuse. It can't be seen in visible light, or even in normal spacecraft infrared images. It took the biggest and best, most powerful infrared telescope ecer put in space to find it.

 

[alpha_centauri]

If this is due to impacts on phoebe one wonders whether there are more of these faint rings in the solar system.

It took the biggest and best, most powerful infrared telescope ecer put in space to find it.

It wasn't discovered by Herschel.........

 

[MeteorWayne]

Yeah, well Herschel has just started regular observations this month, so didn't count at the time

 

[MeteorWayne]

Two other fascinating facts about the ring... The density is almost unbelievably low.
20 particles per cubic kilometer!!!

And second, the ring rotates retrograde, unlike all the other rings. That's because Phoebe is an outer moon in a retrograde orbit.

I might find out some more facts soon as well, currently reading the article in Science.

I noted the original link that dragon posted is dead, I'll try and find a new one to replace it.
Ah, here's the SPitzer press release:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/re ... ease.shtml