Friday April 01, 2011
Making Ripples:
Comets Perturb Jupiter and Saturn's Rings
Ripples in the rings of Saturn and Jupiter have been traced back to collisions with cometary fragments that took place more than a decade ago.
In Jupiter's case, the culprit was the transit of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 through our solar system in 1994.
From Science Daily:
"What's cool is we're finding evidence that a planet's rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate, lead author of one of the papers, and a research associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "The solar system is a much more dynamic place than we gave it credit for."
Posted in: Science by bubblejam at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | Email This Entry