A photograph taken by Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft may show the birth of a new moon in Saturn’s rings.
The spacecraft spotted a disturbance at the edge of Saturn’s outermost ring, which scientists believe indicate the gravitational effects of a nearby object, such as a moon.
The report is published in the journal Icarus, with Professor Carl Murray from Queen Mary’s Astronomy Unit saying of the discovery:
“We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right”
The new moon, dubbed “Peggy”, is less than 1km across, and is not expected to grow any larger, and may disintegrate in the neat future. The possibility of watching the formation, and possibly the disintegration of a moon, however, offers scientists an insight into how Saturn’s other moons, such as Titan and Enceladus, may have formed in the past.
The blurry image was taken with Cassini’s narrow angle camera on April 15, 2013, with the moon too small for Cassini to see directly, but Nasa scientists hope to get a better look at Peggy in late 2016, when Cassini is scheduled to fly near the A ring, which stretches between 122,170 – 136,775km from the centre of the planet.
