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Originally posted by internos
reply to post by ImShrike
I think that the most important thing is that you've found an anomaly of this level near a moon of Jupiter: i don't know if it happened before here, probably mike or zorgon knows it. Anyway, it's really an interesting find.
I made a new close-up:
Originally posted by mikesingh
One of the objects is Earth sized and one over 50,000 Km in length (Four times Earth’s diameter!)
Originally posted by SevenThunders
I'd like to hear an explanation of how a giant perfect cylinder could be formed in the rings of Saturn.
Originally posted by mecheng
Originally posted by mikesingh
One of the objects is Earth sized and one over 50,000 Km in length (Four times Earth’s diameter!)
Earth size??? Four times the Earth's diameter???
Wouldn't something that massive have a gravitational affect on the rotation of Saturn around the sun? If so, wouldn't that have been observed and commented on by now?
[edit on 9-11-2007 by mecheng]
Originally posted by timelike
I made this point a longtime ago in this thread mecheng and it is a good point! Something this size would perturb Staurns rings (gravitationally) very distinctly. I had a good look at Saturn a couple of weeks ago with my 8inch reflector and I followed it all alst year when it was in the sky, and the rings look perfectly normal. There is no discolouration of any sign of any perturbation of the ring system.
Most importantly, such an obbject would be visible in amateur telescopes. Titan is much smaller than the Earth and that is clearly visible, so to are many of the other satellites and they are much smaller than Titan! It's a nice idea, but the whole story just doesn't stand up to close scrutiny...
First off, do we really know what exactly gravity is? Do we have all the answers? How much do we know about gravity waves? Nix! We base our conclusions on known scientific paradigms like Newtons Universal Law of Gravitation. But you'd agree that this not the end to scientific laws and principles? There's more left to discover, than we could ever imagine!
N00023784.jpg was taken on October 29, 2004 and received on Earth October 30, 2004. The camera was pointing toward SATURN-RINGS at approximately 790,933 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters. This image has not been validated or calibrated. A validated/calibrated image will be archived with the NASA Planetary Data System in 2005.
The moon Prometheus slowly collides with the diffuse inner edge of Saturn's F ring in this movie sequence of Cassini images. The oblong moon pulls a streamer of material from the ring and leaves behind a dark channel.
Once during its 14.7-hour orbit of Saturn, Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) reaches the point in its elliptical path, called apoapse, where it is farthest away from Saturn and closest to the F ring. At this point, Prometheus' gravity is just strong enough to draw a "streamer" of material out of the core region of the F ring.
Initially the dust-sized material drawn away from the ring appears to form a streamer pointing ahead of Prometheus in its orbit. (All orbital motion is towards the right in the movie.) Over time, the streamer falls increasingly farther behind Prometheus because material in the F ring is orbiting slower than the moon. The streamer gets longer and a darker "channel" starts to be seen (to the left of the streamer in the movie).
The creation of such streamers and channels occurs in a cycle that repeats each Prometheus orbit: when Prometheus again reaches apoapse, it draws another streamer of material from the F ring. But since Prometheus orbits faster than the material in the ring, this new streamer is pulled from a different location in the ring about 3.2 degrees (in longitude) ahead of the previous one.
The movie shows just under half of a complete streamer-channel cycle. The dark frames in the movie represent the period during which Prometheus and the F ring pass through Saturn's shadow.
The images in the movie were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 23 and 24, 2006. The movie sequence consists of 72 clear spectral filter images taken every 10.5 minutes over a period of about 12.5 hours.
The original images were cropped to show only the region around Prometheus and the nearby portion of the F ring. The movie covers the region between 138,000 and 142,000 kilometers (86,000 and 88,000 miles) radially from Saturn and 1 degree in longitude from Prometheus on each side. Each frame was reprojected such that the vertical axis represents distance from Saturn and the horizontal axis represents longitude around Saturn. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel in the vertical direction; the images cover 0.005 degrees of longitude in the horizontal direction. Because of the reprojection, the F ring appears straight, rather than slightly curved, as it otherwise would.
Since the F ring has an elliptical shape, its radial distance from Saturn varies by about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) around the ring. This accounts for the apparent vertical movement of the ring over the course of the movie. Only a very small part of the ring appears in each of the reprojected frames, so the difference in the ring's radial distance from left to right across any single frame is small enough as to be effectively unnoticeable.
Originally posted by timelike
If there was such an object there, larger than the Earth it would cause a gravitaional pertubation of the ring system. Much of the fine structure would be dissrupted, not to mention the effects on Satellites in the Saturn system!