[NTD News, Beijing time, September 29, 2023]Recently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared a picture of a celestial body on its official Instagram page and asked netizens to guess its name. The shared image showed a white celestial body with a wide ring around it, arousing the curiosity of netizens.
NASA captioned the image on its Instagram page: “Ravioli, dumplings, empanadas…what do you see? There are no wrong answers.”
Netizens were mesmerized by the image. One user wrote: “Can ravioli be cooked on a pan?” Another described it as “cabbage.”
One user called it “the weirdest moon ever! It looks like a hat from above.”
“The one on the left looks like vanilla ice cream,” one person wrote.
Another netizen said it was a “macaron with cream filling oozing out”. One netizen exclaimed that he saw a turtle.
NASA revealed the answer to the mystery in the post. It turns out that the object shown in the picture is a satellite of Saturn called Pan. The image was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Saturn not only has majestic rings, but also many satellites. There are as many as 145 known and named satellites, and Pan is one of them. Not only that, it is also the innermost satellite of this ringed planet. Pan is a small, walnut-shaped moon with an average radius of 8.8 miles located within the Encke gap of Saturn’s A ring. Pan completes an orbit every 13.8 hours, and its orbit is 83,000 miles (about 134,000 kilometers) from Saturn.
These two images from the Cassini spacecraft show the change in perspective when the spacecraft was 15,300 miles (about 24,600 kilometers) from Pan. This is the spacecraft’s closest contact with Pan, improving the level of observation.
The two images were taken from different angles: the image on the left was taken from above Pan, while the image on the right was taken from below. Pan, like Saturn’s moon Atlas, has a prominent equatorial ridge that gives it a unique saucer shape.
Saturn also has dozens of bizarre moons. Titan is the largest of Saturn’s moons, larger than the moon, has extremely cold surface temperatures and is known for its dense, hazy atmosphere and sea of liquid methane.
Enceladus looks like a bright white ball of ice, but its frozen shell is surrounded by a liquid ocean. It continues to eject towering water columns near the South Pole. And Janus, who looks like a meatball.
Janus, the Titan. (NASA/JPL- Caltech /Space Science Institute)
The moons will not be with Saturn forever. Saturn’s main moons may orbit the planet forever, but some smaller and more fragile ring moons may disappear. Younger moonlets created from loose material within Saturn’s rings are more likely to have devastating collisions and be destroyed by gravitational tides.
Over time, satellites tend to drift away from their parent stars. Just as the Moon’s gravity pulls on Earth’s oceans, creating tides, Saturn is pulled along by the gravity of its many moons. At the same time, Saturn’s gravity will also pull the satellites.
It’s like a tug-of-war, with Saturn pushing its moons into wider and wider orbits. Like children on a rapidly spinning merry-go-round being pushed toward the outer edge, Saturn’s moons are gradually pushed away from the planet. However, this process is likely to take longer than the expected lifetime of the solar system (billions of years).
(Comprehensive reporting by reporter Li Zhaoxi/Editor: Lin Qing)
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