Icy activity in the E ring (of Saturn)

About a year ago now, the Cassini mission to Saturn achieved one of its mission objectives by landing a probe (called Huygens) on Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is interesting because, among other things, it is the only moon in the solar system with a significant atmosphere. Significant enough to potentially support life, although it would be a very strange life indeed living in something we would consider a petrochemical soup.

However, while Titan got all the media attention, planetary geologists (of which I am only an amateur) have also been very interested in another moon of Saturn which goes by the moniker Enceladus. Enceladus is a little snowball of a world, only about 500 km across. It orbits Saturn once every 1.3 days, close enough to place it within Saturn’s outermost (and extremely faint) “E” ring. In fact, it appears to orbit within the densest part of the E ring, but more on that in a bit.

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Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!

This month gives us a chance to see some nice “Shooting Stars”, or meteors. Meteors are bits of sand and debris from comets that strike our Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

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A very cool picture of the very first stars

I teach a cosmology course every once in a while, and it is a testament to modern astronomy that cosmological observations are becoming commonplace enough that I have to revise my class notes extensively every time I teach the course.

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