Saturn images

Credit: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS

There are some new reports out about Saturn from the continuing visit of the Cassini space probe. Scientists now know that the rings aren’t flat and they’re constantly changing:

Cassini also revealed that Saturn’s rings are a rough and tumble place, with perturbations to their structures caused by mysterious rocketing objects, the pull of moons and their own internal dynamics.

Cuzzi says that “maybe the most dramatic” perturbation is the one that occurs in the F ring — a system of narrow strands that that lies outside of the main rings.

Cassini found that kilometer-sized objects “go ricocheting back-and-forth across the F ring,” Cuzzi said. Cassini first detected one of these objects just faintly, but when it saw the object again, outside of the ring, it had a long, comet-like tail. The next viewing of it was inside the ring, where the tail got even longer before the whole thing vanished completely, likely because the debris became hard to distinguish from the background of the ring.

There’s some good information here and here.