The tiny moon with the long reach

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Aug 2, 2010 4:13 PMNov 20, 2019 5:41 AM

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When I was a kid, Saturn had one big, flat ring system divided up into maybe three or four broad sections separated by gaps, and that was it. Turns out, we were wrong. Saturn has thousands of rings made up of billions upon billions of tiny ice particles. There aren't just a handful of gaps, there are thousands of them, too, and there are moonlets in those gaps. Those tiny moons tug and pull on the rings, distorting them into weird and fantastic shapes. And "flat"? Not quite. The Cassini mission apparently delights in showing us just how wrong we were:

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