back to article Organic stuff, radiation, unexpected methane... Yes, we're talking about Saturn's surprising rings

Scientists are only beginning to discover just how complex Saturn’s ring system is after digging into the data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. In a series of papers published in Science and the Geophysical Review Letters, different groups of researchers have found that the rings shed organic compounds and they may not …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Space, it's fascinating

    I've had National Geographic posters on my bedroom walls during all my childhood. The solar system, of course, but also one great map of the local galactic cluster, going from our solar system to the local cluster in a reverse zoom effect.

    I always thought the Great Red Spot was eternal and lo, it is shrinking.

    I've always thought Saturn and its rings to be eternal and lo, it is draining.

    Nothing is eternal, even if the timeframes are measured in millennia instead of years. It is awesome, but sometimes a bit sad. One day, our descendants will look at Saturn they'll just see a second Jupiter.

    It's good to be alive now.

  2. Aladdin Sane
    Coat

    Saturn’s D ring

    lulz

    1. Crisp

      Re: Saturn’s D ring

      It's Dirty.

  3. lee harvey osmond

    unexpected methane?

    Unexpected methane? At Saturn, but not Uranus. Detection of methane is expected from time to time at Uranus.

    Yes yes I know, but hey, it's the pun that just goes on giving

    1. Ragarath
      Joke

      Re: unexpected methane?

      To be fair I'm not to worried about the gas from Uranus...

      ...it's the other organic material coming out of Uranus that's my concern.

      1. Giovani Tapini

        Re: unexpected methane?

        No touching your Kuiper belt until you have washed your hands then...

        1. Aladdin Sane

          Re: unexpected methane?

          Not forgetting that Saturn is a massive floater.

  4. David Roberts

    Organic material?

    Doesn’t say how complex, though.

    All the speculation about how the first organic molecules were created on Earth and there are loads just floating about in space? Raining down, as well.

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: Organic material?

      There was an interesting demonstration how all you needed to create many organic molecules was some basic chemicals, a little pressure and lightning: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14966-volcanic-lightning-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth/

    2. Cuddles

      Re: Organic material?

      "Doesn’t say how complex, though."

      Because they don't know. The instrument taking these data is basically just a mass spectrometer - it can measure how heavy a molecule that hits it is, and that's it. They can see that there's a bunch of stuff with atomic mass 28u, which can mean N2, CO or C2H4. And from other data they can infer that at least some of that is C2H4 released from the breakup of bits of the dust and other crap generally floating around the place. But the data here can't say anything about what it was all actually made of before that point.

      "All the speculation about how the first organic molecules were created on Earth and there are loads just floating about in space?"

      Yep, this has been known for a while. Organic compounds, even fairly complex ones, turn out to exist all over the place. The fact that they're relatively common in Saturn's rings is apparently unexpected, but finding them floating around in space isn't really new at all. What this means for the development of early Earth and life is still very much up for debate. On the one hand, it seems organic compounds are all over the place and things like comet impacts could have brought significant amounts to Earth. But on the other hand, there's plenty of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen on Earth anyway so there's no problem forming them right here. It's entirely possible that organic stuff rained from the sky all over early Earth, but was irrelevant to the formation of life because we already had plenty of out own anyway.

      1. the spectacularly refined chap

        Re: Organic material?

        Because they don't know. The instrument taking these data is basically just a mass spectrometer - it can measure how heavy a molecule that hits it is, and that's it. They can see that there's a bunch of stuff with atomic mass 28u, which can mean N2, CO or C2H4. And from other data they can infer that at least some of that is C2H4 released from the breakup of bits of the dust and other crap generally floating around the place. But the data here can't say anything about what it was all actually made of before that point.

        It's considerably more refined than simply looking at the total mass of the molecule. The ionisation process so the compound can be accelerated naturally breaks up some proportion of the input. The fragments get detected in addition to the complete molecule so you have to consider the potential fragmentation points of a candidate molecule and how those correlate to the data you see.

        For example ethane, relative molecular mass 30 which is what the bulk of the signal of a pure sample would return. However you could shave a hydrogen atom off giving results at 1 and 29 as well. Or it could be broken between the carbons giving another report at 15. You have a lot more data for identification than a simple report of the total mass.

  5. earl grey
    Unhappy

    science is so wonderful

    Now, if we could only get our social (governments) fixed.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

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