Can you see Saturn's moon Pan? Its that tiny white dot left of center, within Saturn's rings. Despite its size in comparison to the planet, the moon actually plays a key role in shaping Saturn's changing rings. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this image on July 2 of this year from a distance of about 840,000 miles away.
The rings of Saturn are one of our most instantly recognizable images of outer space, but those beautiful rings of rock and dust now have some competition. In a paper that was recently accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal, scientists from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester announced that they had found a planet with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's rings, which measure a piddling 175,000 miles across.
ScientistsscrutinisingCassini imagery have stumbled on a strange find - evidence of 0.8kilometre-sized snowballs perforating one of Saturn's rings, creating miniature contrail-like streams in the ring's shape. The pictures answer a mysterious question about the F ring, Saturn's oddest ring.
