Wow.
Just saw a report on The 9 o clock RTE news regarding this.
Amazing new feature.
Even more amazing is that RTE ran it early and gave a
Seperate reporter to it.

saw it to, man its big.
www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091007-saturn-big-ring.html

Picture here

Wonder what the devision will be called:woohoo:

Barberskum wrote:

Even more amazing is that RTE ran it early and gave a
Seperate reporter to it.

Maybe they though it was built by the the Liam O'Carroll group

Whats the story here?

I saw - a tantalisingly detailed article - on the BBC website (Science and Nature) on this.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8291905.stm

Now there is a new paper being submitted to Nature that suggests that material ejected from minor impacts to Phoebe (outer moon) migrate inwards and hit the leading edge of Iapetus (inner moon) - giving it a dark side and leaving a light side.

I'm still not sure if what is being reported is really a new ring.

Does anyone have a better understanding?

Mark

Wow I read today that it is so diffuse that if you were 'standing' in a
cubic KM of it there would only be 8 - 10 particles of less than 10 microns in that area!
Isn't amazing that that is why Iapetus has that 'two - tone' colouration!
You really can't tell what will be discovered next eH!

Barberskum wrote:

Isn't amazing that that is why Iapetus has that 'two - tone' colouration!
You really can't tell what will be discovered next eH!

To be honest when I first saw this famous pic ages ago:



and the article on New Scientists website or wherever I saw it was going on about how the discolouration was some new big mystery of the Cosmos or something the first thing I thought of was that it was probably collecting ring material as it moved along its orbit, should have written a paper about it at the time, could have been famous, damn