Carnival of Space 124 Giant Dust Ring Around Saturn and Great New Astronomy Pictures

The Carnival of Space 124 is up at “We are all in the gutter”

This site contributed a look at orbital launch guns from new light gas gun proposals to ram accelerators to underground nuclear cannons.

Bad Astronomy has a NASA’s Swift satellite snapshot of the Andromeda galaxy in the ultraviolet spectrum.

Discovery Space news reports that the Spitzer telescope has detected a very large dust ring around Saturn Rather that being isolated to a comparatively paper-thin ring plane. The new ring is as thick as 20 Saturn diameters, making the structure more inner tube like. The super-sized ring extends from 3.7 to 7.4 million miles from Saturn

Universe Today has more information on the Saturn dust ring and interview with one of the scientific team that found it.

Just how big is this ring? “If you had infrared eyes like Spitzer,” said Anne Verbiscer, research astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, “from Earth, it would look like one full moon on either side of Saturn.” That’s incredibly huge! The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). A billion Earths could fit in the volume of space this ring occupies.

If you were standing inside the ring you wouldn’t even know it. In a cubic kilometer of space there are only 10-20 particles. The particles are about the same size as fog particles, but they are very spread out.

Check out the Carnival of Space 124 at “We are all in the gutter” for a lot more