One of the most alluring things about space is that because of its very vastness, it’s possible for truly enormous things to effectively be hidden in plain sight for centuries, even millennia. Then, one day, some clever stargazers think of a new way to look at part of the sky that’s been stared at countless times before, and suddenly something truly magnificent appears.
This week, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with the Spitzer Space Telescope, identified a new ring around Saturn — a ring so vast that its size is hard to comprehend.
The inside edge of this ring is some 3.7 million miles away from Saturn, and the ring itself is 7.4 million miles wide. It’s not very dense; at 20 particles per cubic centimeter, you couldn’t walk around on it. That’s reason it wasn’t spotted sooner. Within it orbits Saturn’s moon Phoebe, which is one of the planet’s most distant satellites; both Phoebe and the ring, in fact, orbit in the opposite direction of the rest of the moons and rings.
The ring was found by University of Virginia-Charlottesville astronomer Anne Verbiscer and her colleagues, who used the Spitzer Telescope’s infrared imaging system to identify the giant ring. According to the JPL website’s article on the discovery, infrared was the key to finding the ring.
“The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes,” the article reads. “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 relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn’t reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.”
Added Verbiscer: “The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn’t even know it.” Of course, he means “float around in the ring.”
Another Saturnian mystery may have been solved by the discovery of the new ring, as well. Back in 1671, the astronomer discovered a Saturn moon he named Iapetus, and several years later he noted the moon has a giant dark spot on it. Now it’s suspected that the spot was created by impacts of materials from the ring on Iapetus, “slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield,” according to JPL.
The first thing most astrology readers are going to ask is: what is the implication for astrology? My reply: the solar system, which makes up most of our symbolic set of references for the astrology we do, is a work in progress. We hardly know anything about it.
It’s remarkable that this discovery is announced just as Mercury was making a conjunction to Saturn, in aspect to the Galactic Core (see Wednesday’s daily astrology post). This is a message from Saturn. And it’s about the galactic nature of Saturn (for eons, thought to be the outermost planet): this ring has the distinct image of a galaxy, a far-flung plane of dust.
The ring also does something a little like Pluto or a Centaur planet: it intersects the plane of Saturn’s traditionally referenced rings at an angle. Pluto’s angle of intersection the Sun’s equator is about 11 degrees. This ring intersects at about 27 degrees. So there’s a mystery. If some force is holding the other rings in place where they are, some other previously unknown force is holding this one in place. That raises more questions than it provides answers, though one implication is that this is how Saturn works in astrology as well. It has another influence than the one we think it has.