A Hole in the Rings

In the past year this blog has reported many discoveries about Saturn. A mysterious "hot spot" on Enceladus' South Pole resupplies the E Ring. Prometheus' interactions with F Ring include a mysterious stream of materiel connecting them. The B Ring is filled with tightly bound clumps of particles. Saturn's poles contain aurorae, a polar storm and enigmatic hexagon. There is far more here than meets the eye.

In the October 25 issue of NATURE, scientists report discovery of more "propellor" features. These are huge wakes, 10-20 km long, formed by unseen objects orbiting within the Rings. The objects are invisibly orbiting at a distance of about 130,000 km, occupying a band 3200 km wide. They have been interpreted as stadium-sized rocks, but the mass is also just right for tiny Black Holes. Space.com reports this as "More Strange Holes Found in Saturn's Rings."

Moons like Enceladus and Prometheus exist inside the "Roche Limit." It was once thought that this marked a demarcation line within which moons would be torn apart. Prometheus has one of the lowest densities of a solar system object, just 0.47 g/cm^3. That is less than 1/2 the density of liquid water. It is very odd that objects with less density than liquid should exist inside the Roche Limit, within which liquid objects are not supposed to exist.

H.G Wells' Invisible Man was finally discovered by tracks he left in snow. Saturn's Rings are literally a field of ice in which the tracks of invisible objects can be seen. If our Solar System contains tiny Black Holes, this is a good place to look. If these small moons contained singularities, it would explain how they formed and stay together. The Rings show conditions similiar to our Solar System's formation. Singularities may be the key to how Earth and the planets were created.