The International Astronomical Union there was found a new moon hidden in one of Saturn’s dazzling outer rings. The international Cassini spacecraft spotted a new moonlet in Saturn’s rings, which measures about a third of a mile wid, was announced Tuesday The discovery was announced Tuesday.
“Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd,” Matthew Hedman, an astronomy research associate at Cornell University and a member of the Cassini imaging team, said in a statement. “The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data,” Hedman said, “should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring.”
“The entire G ring could be derived from an arc of debris held in resonance with Mimas,” the scientists write in the journal Science.
Photo NASA