ASTRON 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Zodiacal Light, Perseids, Quadrantids
Document Summary
Few imagined they existed before the era of telescopes: in 1610, something funny was noticed about saturn by galileo, huygens" telescope saw the rings of saturn for the first time. Jupiter"s ring is very dark and thin: dust is backlit by the sun, dust goes all the way until the cloud top of the planet. Uranus: rings were studied in 1985 by voyager 2, there is one major ring, with other smaller rings and a few pseudo rings on the planet. The major ring is tilted 4 degrees off from the equator, and more elliptical than circular. This could be indicative of it being a newer ring. One of them has three thicker spots (revealed in 1989 august: both uranus" and neptune"s rings are largely made up of dark dust. Saturn: made of thin dark dust, snowflakes, and snowballs. Biggest size of which is about the size of a house.
