daryoush talati
PASADENA, Calif. --
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around
Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.
The
new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit
tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. 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). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within
the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
Saturn's
newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the
diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked
together to fill the ring.
"This is one supersized ring," said
Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia,
Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of
two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn." Verbiscer;
Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park; and
Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are
authors of a paper about the discovery to be published online tomorrow
by the journal Nature.
An artist's concept
of the newfound ring is online at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/spitzer-20091007a.html
.
The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice
and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow
of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently
107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the
sun.
The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of
Saturn's moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance -- one side is bright
and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang
symbol. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671,
and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio
in his honor. A stunning picture of Iapetus taken by NASA's Cassini
spacecraft is online at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08384
.
Saturn's newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came
to be. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while
Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's moons are all going the
opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty
material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the
icy moon like bugs on a windshield.
"Astronomers have long
suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe
and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. "This new ring
provides convincing evidence of that relationship."
Verbiscer and her
colleagues used Spitzer's longer-wavelength infrared camera, called the
multiband imaging photometer, to scan through a patch of sky far from
Saturn and a bit inside Phoebe's orbit. The astronomers had a hunch that
Phoebe might be circling around in a belt of dust kicked up from its
minor collisions with comets -- a process similar to that around stars
with dusty disks of planetary debris. Sure enough, when the scientists
took a first look at their Spitzer data, a band of dust jumped out.
The
ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its
particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring
material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary
space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn't
reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is
weak.
"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand
in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer.
Spitzer
was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80
Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared,
or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing
with infrared light. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust,
Spitzer made it easy to find," said Verbiscer.
These
observations were made before Spitzer ran out of coolant in May and
began its "warm" mission.
NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space
Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the
California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages
JPL for NASA. The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer was built by
Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., and the University of
Arizona, Tucson. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the
University of Arizona