The pictures sent by the spacecraft “Cassini”, an international research team first considered the traces of collision of tiny meteoroids with the rings of Saturn.
Smaller diameter from a few centimeters to a few dozen meters continuously treated bodies of the solar system. Even gets to Earth: remember 17-meter meteor streaking over Chelyabinsk February 15. But to see something like this in the vicinity of Saturn has not yet succeeded.
| view of the cloud of fragments of broken bodies in the rings of Saturn. Top left – a couple shots of the ring A, taken with an interval of 24.5 hours. Top right and bottom left – a ring C, bottom right – B. (Image NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Cornell.) |
Scientists have identified the traces left by nine facilities in 2005, 2009 and 2012. Saturnian equinox, the summer of 2009, has been particularly fruitful, very low angle of the sun’s rays has led to the fact that the photographs “Cassini” clouds of debris seemed very bright against the dark rings.
«We knew that these small collisions occur constantly, but we were not known for their size and frequency, – says lead author Matt Tiskareno of Cornell University (USA). – And we do not anticipate that they will be the result of spectacular clouds ».
Thus, the rings of Saturn have become the fourth place the Solar System (after the Earth, Moon and Jupiter), where scientists and amateur astronomers observed the collision. Incidentally, the fact that the rings act as giant flytrap has long been known. For example, a kind of ripples on the inner rings, extending for 19 thousand km, indicating a collision with some object in 1983.
Mr. Tiskareno and his colleagues believe that large meteoroids disintegrate at the first meeting with rings, giving rise to a relatively small and slow parts that go into orbit around Saturn. Repeated interaction with the rings leads to the very clouds of debris. Because the tiny particles that make up these “clusters” have a different orbital velocity clouds soon stretched into strips.
study the degree of activity bombardment helps scientists understand how the system is formed of a planet. The particles of the rings of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, for example, very dark, because the incessant hail of meteoroids carried a material saturated with carbon and silicates. On the contrary, the rings of Saturn have high brightness, which gave rise to the hypothesis that their relative youth of the planet.
The study is published in the journal Science.
Adapted from Queen Mary College, University of London.
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