today NASA announced that its spitzer telescope had detected the presence of a faint "super-sized" ring around the planet saturn, tilted 27 degrees from saturn's equatorial plane (and that of the other rings). the ring extends from 128 to 207 times the radius of saturn, and is about 20 times as thick as the diameter of the planet. the ring's particles are presumed to originate from impacts on saturn's moon phoebe, and they share phoebe's retrograde orbit. (click on image to enlarge)
it is a strange and wondrous universe out there -- and we're still just getting to know our own tiny neighborhood, the solar system. i live for discoveries like this.
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