United States or Indonesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If real, the phenomenon signified that whereas the space outside the ring, where the satellites of the planet travel, was occupied by some sort of cosmical dust, the space within the ring-system was, as it were, swept and garnished, as though all the scattered matter which might otherwise have occupied that region had been either attracted to the body of the planet or to the rings.
With its ten moons and its marvellous ring-system an enormous collection of fragments, which the influence of the planet or of its nearer satellites seems to have prevented from concentrating Saturn has always been a beautiful object to observe; it is not less interesting in those features which we faintly detect in its disk.
It was thought possible that the ring-system is of the nature of a vast ocean, whose waves are steadily advancing upon the planet's globe.
The discovery of this singular appendage, an object unique in the solar system, naturally attracted fresh attention to the question of the stability of the rings. The idea was thrown out by the elder Bond that the new ring may be fluid, or even that the whole ring-system may be fluid, and the dark ring simply thinner than the rest.
Of what matter it is composed, and how it resists disintegration, is still an unsettled question; but it might almost seem that the Designer of the universe, in permitting its existence, had been willing to impart to His intelligent creatures the manner in which celestial bodies are evolved, and that this remarkable ring-system is a remnant of the nebula from which Saturn was himself developed, and which, from some unknown cause, has become solidified.
The system would no more be able to resist such strains and pressures than an arch of iron spanning the Atlantic would be able to sustain its own weight against the earth's attraction. It would be necessary then that the ring-system should rotate around the planet.
This circumstance clearly suggests that the darkness of these parts is due to the background, or, in other words, that the sky is in reality seen through those parts of the ring-system, just as the darkness of the slate-coloured interior ring is attributed, on the satellite theory, to the background of sky visible through the scattered flight of satellites forming the dark ring.
But the mathematical examination of the subject disposed so thoroughly of the theory that the rings can consist of continuous fluid masses, that we need not now discuss the physical objections to the theory. There remains only the theory that the Saturnian ring-system consists of discrete masses analogous to the streams of meteors known to exist in great numbers within the solar system.
The whole ring-system, too, appears to be somewhat elliptical. The satellite-theory has derived unlooked-for support from photometric inquiries. Professor Seeliger pointed out in 1888 that the unvarying brilliancy of the outer rings under all angles of illumination, from 0° to 30°, can be explained from no other point of view.
Nothing but the division of the ring into a number of narrow hoops could possibly save it from destruction through the internal strains and pressures to which its material would be subjected. Even this complicated arrangement, however, would not save the ring-system.
Word Of The Day