Half-Mile Sized SNOWBALLS Hold It Down In Saturn’s Weirdest Ring

Getting my learn on today! Watch in amusement as I don my Thinking Cap – shaped like a giant phallus with built-in glowing veins courtesy of a AAA batter – and learn all about Saturn’s weirdest ring. Come along with me, and learn about half-mile sized snowballs and lurking moons.

io9:

Weird half-mile-sized objects have now been seen punching through what may be Saturn’s strangest ring, leaving sparkling trails behind them. And researchers say these findings could shed light on the oddball behavior of that ring.

The Saturnian ring in question is the planet’s F ring, the outermost discrete ring of the planet. The F ring is unusually active, with features changing on a timescale as short as a few hours.

“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring,” said researcher Carl Murray at Queen Mary University of London.

Scientists have known that Saturn’s moon Prometheus and other relatively large objects can generate channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring. However, it was uncertain what happened to these snowballs after they were created.

Now, using the Cassini probe to Saturn, Murray and his colleagues find these snowballs can tear through the F ring, leaving behind glittering trails the researchers are calling “mini-jets.” Sometimes these snowballs traveled in packs, creating exotic-looking mini-jets resembling the barb of a harpoon. (Here’s a NASA video of a close-up view of a mini-jet.)

“These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half-mile in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles in size, creating a spectacular show,” Murray said. “These latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought.”