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back to article Supercomputers crack Saturn's ice-cold ring

Supercomputing boffins may have solved the mystery of how it came to be that Saturn's rings are so bright in the night sky. The planet's rings are largely made of ice, making them so visible that Galileo first spotted them using a primitive telescope in the early 1600s. Meanwhile, similar ring systems around Uranus and Neptune …

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  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Pint

    Damn I love Science...

    That is such an elegant solution, I love it...

    Give those Boffins a Beer (or Sake if they prefer) for such great work! :)

    6 0 Reply
  2. DNTP

    Solar system formation

    must have been strictly hit-or-miss. Since we still have planets and a Kuiper belt there must have been lots of miss, but also lots of hits. One of those impacts was thought to have literally knocked Uranus 90 degrees on its side.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Swarthy
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Re: Solar system formation

      Really, that set-up and you didn't go anywhere near a "knocked Uranus on it's arse" joke?

      6 0 Reply
      1. Unicornpiss
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: Solar system formation

        ...we know where the dark ring around Uranus came from.

        1 0 Reply
  3. mhenriday
    Boffin

    Pluto-sized rocks ?

    «large numbers of Pluto-sized rocks from the Kuiper Belt encircling the Solar System fell towards the Sun and smashed into planets on their the way in.

    Many of the craters we see on the Moon are the result of this bombardment, for example.»

    I suggest that in the event «[m]any of the craters we see on the Moon» were really the result of a bombardment by «Pluto-sized rocks» - i e, bodies with a diameter of some 2370 km (the Moon's diameter is approx 3474 km) the Moon would look very different from the way it does today....

    Henri

    0 0 Reply

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