Washington, October 07: After centuries of observation, astronomers have identified yet another ring around Saturn, according to an article appearing Wednesday in the journal Nature. The newly discovered ring is barely visible, yet includes one of Saturn’s most famous and long-identified moons, Phoebe, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The laboratory helps operate the Spitzer Space Telescope which was used to identify the ring.
It took Spitzer’s infrared eyes to tease out the image of the tenuous, thin array of ice and dust particles in the ring, the laboratory said in a statement. The ring is impossible to see with visible-light telescopes because of its extremely low temperature of 80 Kelvin (minus 193 degrees Celsius) and far distance from the sun.
Along with Phoebe, the new ring orbits in the opposite direction from most of Saturn’s other famous rings and moons. It is also tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane, the report said.
The ring starts around 6 million kilometres from the planet and extends outward another 12 million kilometres, the laboratory said. It is also quite thick, about 20 times Saturn’s diameter.
“This is one super-sized ring,” said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
–Agencies