Lord Of The Rings

The planet Saturn has a new ring.

To be honest, Saturn has had this ring for millions of years, but it was only just detected by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Unlike Saturn’s easy-to-see rings that are composed of mostly rock and space debris and hug the planet, this new, super-ring is composed mainly of ice and dust. In fact, the ring would be almost impossble to see using a visible-light telescope since the small number of particles in the ring don’t reflect much visible light. As a result, it was only discovered using infrared imaging systems on the Spitzer Telescope.

Infrared imaging systems are used to detect heat, and were able to detect the faint glow of the temperature difference between the cool ice and dust in the ring and the much cooler temperatures in the vacuum of space. How cool is the ring? Try about -193 degrees Celsius (about -316 degrees Fahrenheit).

The ring is huge, with the bulk of the ring starting some six million kilometers (about 3.7 million miles) from Saturn’s surface. The ring extends outward another 12 million kilometers (about 7.4 million miles). According to NASA, it would take about one billion Earth’s stacked together to fill the monster ring. NASA speculates that Saturn’s moon, Phoebe, is likely the source of the ring’s material.

For more information about this new discovery, check out the NASA Web site: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/07oct_giantring.htm.

For more information about the Spitzer Space Telescope, check out: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/about/index.shtml.