The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 11, 2009

Official News page 6


REAL LIFE NEWS: SATURN'S NEW RING MAY EXPLAIN MOON MYSTERY

by Hazed

A new ring around Saturn has been discovered, extending about 7.4 million miles out from the planet, making it by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings. It was found by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was launched in 2003 and is currently 66 million miles away from Earth in orbit around the sun.

One of the outermost moons, Phoebe, circles within the newly found ring, and is the likely source of the material that it is made of. The ring isn't just wide, it's thick too, with a vertical height about 20 times the diameter of the planet. But it's not a dense ring, being made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles.

The discovery of the new ring may help us to understand the mystery of Iapetus, one of Saturn's other moons. Scientists have been puzzled by the fact that one side of the moon is bright and the other really dark. Now they think some of the material from the outer ring moves inwards towards the icy moon and slams into it like bugs on a windshield. You can see an amazing photo of Iapetus here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08384.

For more info on Saturn's new ring, see NASA's Spitzer website here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-20091006.html.

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