Saturns Rings

There is an observation that spokes appear in Saturns rings origianly from
Voyager but now from Cassini.
It seems obvious that these are some optical effect and not a physical one.
I believe the waves of light are producing
this from interference basically or some interaction with the millimeter
size particles or more.

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:53:25 GMT, "Saturn" wrote:

There is an observation that spokes appear in Saturns rings origianly from
Voyager but now from Cassini.
It seems obvious that these are some optical effect and not a physical one.
I believe the waves of light are producing
this from interference basically or some interaction with the millimeter
size particles or more.

I'm not sure what the difference is between an optical and a physical
effect (in my lexicon, optical effects are physical). And I think you
are a bit loose with "obvious"- the cause isn't obvious to me, and you
haven't added anything to make it so.

Light from a continuum source is unlikely to show visible interference
effects, particularly when interacting with particles much larger than
its wavelength. This is the realm of scatter phenomena, and it isn't
clear how they could produce fine spoke structures.

The best explanation I've heard so far is that the spokes are the
shadows of particles knocked out of the ring system by small bodies
passing through them. The explanation holds up to modeling, and explains
the random appearance and transient nature of the spokes.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

I recall that the ring scientists determined that the spokes were
particles that were electrostatically levitated above the ring plane.
Their movement defied orbital mechanics, so they must be bound by
electric charge. This was established shortly after the Voyager
encounters, in peer-reviewed journals.

Matthew Ota

Seems like I can remember (obvious problems can follow that statement)
reading that the spokes were due to small particles raised above the
ring plane while they were in Saturn's shadow, and they weren't all that
stabile.
Marty

Saturn wrote:
There is an observation that spokes appear in Saturns rings origianly from
Voyager but now from Cassini.
It seems obvious that these are some optical effect and not a physical one.
I believe the waves of light are producing
this from interference basically or some interaction with the millimeter
size particles or more.


If it seems obvious, write a grant proposal, collect the data, and write
the paper.

Shawn