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Unraveling the Enigma of Saturn’s Huge, Ghostly Halo

12-06-2015 1:13am

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RINGS AROUND PLANETS are supposed to stay close to home, as any Astro 101 textbook will tell you. Once they venture too far afield from their gravitational overlord, conventional astronomical wisdom dictates that they will collapse and form new satellites.

“That does a really good job of explaining rings—except for this one,” says Douglas Hamilton, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland. Hamilton and colleagues describe Saturn’s biggest, strangest, most recently-discovered ring in a study published today in Nature. The so-called Phoebe ring is not only bigger than the researchers thought, it appears to be made of unusually fine particles—particles that continually collide with Saturn’s moon Iapetus as it circles the planet, turning the moon’s leading face black.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/phoebe-ring-saturn/

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