Deep in the outer realms of our solar system, well over a billion kilometers away, something bizarre happened at Saturn's F ring. I mean, seriously: what the hell happened here?
This is one of the latest pictures returned from the remarkable human achievement that is the Cassini spacecraft, a probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the ringed planet since 2004. It's returned one incredible picture after another, and lately -- as Saturn's orbit has brought it to a point where the rings are nearly edge-on to the Sun -- things have gotten not only spectacular but also really weird. The rings are incredibly thin, only a few meters in thickness despite being hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. Over the past few months, as the Sun shines almost straight into the rings (instead of down on them), every bump and irregularity sticks out like, well, ...
