Video Description: Showcases the Saturnian system, beginning with the planet itself and panning out to its newest addition -- an enormous ring discovered in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Source: NASA
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn, along with Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, is classified as a gas giant. Saturn has a prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Source:
Wikipedia, Saturn.
Phoebe ring
On 6 October 2009, the discovery of a tenuous disk of material in the plane of and just interior to the orbit of Phoebe was announced. This disk can be loosely described as another ring. Although very large, the ring is virtually invisible � it was discovered using NASA's infra-red Spitzer Space Telescope.
The ring was seen over the entire range of the observations, which extended from 128 to 207 times the radius of Saturn, with calculations indicating that it may extend outward up to 300 Saturn radii and inward to the orbit of Iapetus
at 59 Saturn radii; Phoebe orbits the planet at an average distance of 215 radii.
The ring is about 40 times as thick as the diameter of the planet. Since the ring's particles are presumed to have originated from impacts (micrometeoroid and larger) on Phoebe, they should share its retrograde orbit, which is opposite to the orbital motion of the next inner moon, Iapetus.
This ring lies in the plane of Saturn's orbit, or roughly the ecliptic, and thus is tilted 27 degrees from Saturn's equatorial plane and the other rings. Phoebe is inclined by 5� with respect to Saturn's orbit plane (often written as 175�, due to Phoebe's retrograde orbital motion), and its resulting vertical excursions above and below the ring plane agree closely with the ring's observed thickness of 40 Saturn radii.
Source: Wikipedia,
Rings
of Saturn.
