Saturn's Largest Ring

A press release was published in October of this year announcing the discovery of a new ring around Saturn, one that is now labeled as its largest and most difuse ring that we know of. This ring begins at approximately four million miles away from Saturn itself, and ends at about seven million miles away. Not only is the ring immensely wide, but it is incredibly tall, too, spanning well over twenty times the diameter of Saturn.


Saturn has two main categories for its rings. Its main section is the brighest and easiest to see through use of a powerful, visible-light telescope. These rings are very dense and very thin, and are comprised of particales called "moonlets," which are termed as fragments of rock and ice. In Saturn's main rings, these moonlets range from the size of a pebble to the size of a house, and are frequently colliding with each other. Saturn's second category of rings is where its largest rings fall into. In contrast, these ring particles are extremely small, most accurately resembling smoke. It was discovered that this particular ring is composed of tiny shards and dust particles, and is so spread out in comparision to Saturn's visible rings that one wouldn't even realize that they were inside of it. Unlike the visible, dense rings, this ring can only be seen through use of the satellite Spitzer's infrared lighting, which first spotted the ring to begin with.


It has long been wondered what the connection between Saturn's rings and moons were. Some believed that the moons swept up these particles and threw them into the path of other moons. With the discovery of this ring, this hypothesis is very possible, for Saturn's outer ring follows the path of the moon Phoebe, both of which travel opposite of most of Saturn's moons and rings. It is now thought that Phoebe is sweeping up these ring particles and expelling them at the moon Iapetus, in which case would account for the moon's strange dark spot. Furthermore, this would prove that Saturn's rings aren't stationary, timeless particles. Instead, it would prove that like every other natural process, Saturn's rings follow a cycle. If their cycle ends with a collision into a moon or other object, then perhaps it is possible that larger rock fragments - like meteors - can enter a moon's atmosphere and strike its surface, thus propelling new ice and dust fragments out into Saturn's enormous ring. Such a discovery would be a huge leap in understanding how Saturn's rings are formed and what exactly their relationship with Saturn and its moons is.