When Galileo Galilei became the first person to lay eyes on Saturn's rings in 1610, he was unsure what they were, according to the European Space Agency. Small, low density moons can be found in Saturn's rings: When were Saturn’s rings discovered? As each ring contains multiple kinks and bright clusters, this ring can produce a braided pattern, according to. Saturn’s F ring is made up of many narrow rings. The E ring is the largest and outermost ring, spanning 621,370 miles (about one million kilometers) and lying next to another faint ring, G. Meanwhile, the D ring is extremely dim and lies closest to the planet. The first three rings to be discovered (A, B and C) are the easiest to spot, due to them being bright, main rings of the planet, according to NASA Science. Combined, the rings stretch across thousands of miles of space. These observations were made before Spitzer ran out of coolant in May and began its "warm" mission.Each ring contains orbiting matter. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find," said Verbiscer. Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). "The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn't reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Sure enough, when the scientists took a first look at their Spitzer data, a band of dust jumped out. The astronomers had a hunch that Phoebe might be circling around in a belt of dust kicked up from its minor collisions with comets –€” a process similar to that around stars with dusty disks of planetary debris. Verbiscer and her colleagues used Spitzer's longer-wavelength infrared camera, called the multiband imaging photometer, to scan through a patch of sky far from Saturn and a bit inside Phoebe's orbit. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship." "Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's moons are all going the opposite way. Saturn's newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came to be. A stunning picture of Iapetus taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft is online at. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671, and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio in his honor. Iapetus has a strange appearance –€” one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol. The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn's moons. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the sun. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn." Verbiscer Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park and Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are authors of a paper about the discovery to be published online tomorrow by the journal Nature. "This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring. Saturn's newest halo is thick, too –€” its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. – NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn –€” by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.
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