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Saturn birth news: Its a bouncing baby moon

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Image credit: Nasa/JPL
According to The Independant, new images from Nasa’s Cassini-Huygens space probe suggest that Saturn may be in the process of forming a new moon (or moonlet), which has already been affectionately named by scientists as ‘Peggy’. Saturn already has 62 known moons, which would make this the 63rd moon for Saturn and the first one which humans have been able to watch come into existance. The bright smear at the bottom edge of the ring is estimated to be about 750 miles long and shows where Peggy’s gravity is thought to be effecting ring particles.

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  1. I can’t help but think of the TNG opening whenever I see Saturn’s rings. I’m sure you feel me on that Mike.

    • But both Jupiter and Saturn were critical to Galileo and his research, and I usually try to track them when they are in the night sky.

      • I never really watched ST: V outside of the first season I made my parents tape for me (it was after my bed time!).

        But it definitely was in the TNG intro, and there is some ‘Neil DeGrasse Tyson vs Gravity’ level of astronomical controversy involved.

        But of course seeing it from a telescope was an amazing experience, and it looked just as good at the Harvard Observatory as it did at Danehey Park on a portable telescope.

        • BBCAmerica runs ST:TNG every morning, and right now, they are up near season 6, so I will look for this tomorrow and correct if I am incorrect in my memory.

          • The sequence with Saturn is not the sequence I was think of.

            In the intro to ST:TNG, they show a shot of Saturn from above, so that you are looking down on the rings, and as the planet tracks from left to right, the starfield in the background within the gaps of the rings does not match the starfield outside the rings. So you are correct.

            The sequence I was think of in ST:Voyager shows Saturn so that the rings are just above the POV, and the POV tracks up, so that you pass through the rings and see the rings on edge and what looks like an plane of asteroids and then you see Saturn and the rings as though you are standing on the rings from above.

            So I got the two sequences confused. Sorry.

            • I hadn’t remembered it from Voyager. From the sounds of it they had the better intro (even if there is no doubt that TNG was the stronger show)

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