Asteroids have rings, too?!

Wow, I think my head just exploded!  

Out between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune - orbits 10199 Chariklo, an asteroid-like object that's a little more than 90 miles in diameter.  It may be small, but Charriklo shares a feature similar to it's gas giant neighbors....rings.  

Astronomers think Chariklo has two flat, dense, thin rings, about 4.3 miles  and 2 miles in width, with a 5.5-mile gap between them.

Read the complete Pop Sci article HERE

Cassini Records Meteor Hits on Saturn's Rings

Cameras on the Cassini spacecraft recently recorded debris plumes caused by meteors impacting Saturn's rings.   Not a lot is known about the meteors other than speculation as to their size.  Estimates have suggested that they were far smaller, possibly as tiny as three feet across, than even those that crashed in rural Russia.  The damage however comes from the meteor's high velocity, somewhere in the order of ten miles a second.  

The first images were taken in '09 but were overlooked because of their minuscule size. If you look at the photos here,  you can see light colored streaks.  Even though they were tiny, the resulting dust plume,  at the brightest part is over 3000 miles long but only 125 miles wide, which made it difficult to detect at certain angles. 

You can read more of the article here on IO9

Saturn's Rings : Did Saturn Eat one of its' Moons?

Tim Sayell sends in a Yahho News article that really puts a new spin on the formation of Saturn's complex ring system. A new theory on the formation of the Saturn ring system is published in the latest issue of Nature. It seems that researchers have uncovered evidence that a disk of hydrogen gas once surrounded Saturn. This long lost gas ring seems to be evidence that there was once one more moon orbiting Saturn that at present. Some 4.5 billion years ago, this mystery moon was pulled down to its' distruction by Saturn. As the moon spiraled in, Saturn stripped off outer layers of ices that now make up the rings. This really puts present theories in question that the rings formed by moons coliding and breaking up. But with a large gas ring in place there is every possibility that there may have been many more larger close in moons around Saturn. The gas would eventually slow the moons and force them out of orbit.

Read the rest of the facinating article here

What if Earth had Saturn style rings?

Roy Prol gives us an animated tour of an Earth with just such a ring structure. Plus some killer views of what it would look like from the surface at different locals on the planet.