Re: AKICIF: The rings of Saturn
- From: Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:06:25 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 18, 12:45 pm, "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Butch Malahide <fred.gal...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
All that can be said definitely is that very large particles, a
quarter of a mile in diameter, are so unlikely that their existence
can be denied. But otherwise it has been impossible to determine an
"average size" for them. The problem probably cannot be solved by
observation from earth.
I can't figure out whether these are your own words or Ley's.
Sorry! The last two paragraphs of my post--everything after the colon--
was quoted from Willy Ley's "Watchers of the Skies".
Either
way, I think measuring how the brightness of a star fluctuates as it
passes behind the rings would tell you the sizes of the particles.
I wouldn't know about that. The discussion in Ley's book seems to
imply that star occultations only get you an upper bound for the sizes
of the ring particles. From an earlier occultation (on February 9,
1917, of a seventh-magnitude star in Gemini) it was determined that
they had to be much less than a quarter mile in diameter, since
particles that big would have caused "a definite flickering of the
star image" which was not observed.
.
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