Glitch Discovered In Saturn’s Rings By Cassini Spacecraft Images
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently ended its 20-year mission to Saturn. It was the first spacecraft to ever orbit the massive gas giant to study the planet’s myriad features, such as its extensive system of rings. These seemingly perfect bands of ice and rock had been photographed before and were thought to be mostly understood by astronomers, until Cassini found a rare exception: A glitch on the outer edge of the planet’s A-ring.
Is Peggy Just a Moonlet?
Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft has always been on a suicide mission, albeit one filled with scientific discovery. That mission lasted just under 20 years, and its final days resulted in some of the most exciting images of the second largest planet in our solar system. The spacecraft discovered two new moons, deployed a probe that landed on Titan, and slipped between two layers of rings in its orbit.
Over its 10-year orbital period, images from Cassini began to show something that has still gone unexplained, a glitch in one of the rings. This glitch was first discovered by a long-time member of the imaging team, Carl Murray, who named it after his mother-in-law, Peggy, whose birthday it was.
When first imaged in 2013, Peggy was about 1.5 miles wide, and imperfect compared to Saturn’s otherwise pristine circuits. Because of its tiny size, the Cassini spacecraft was unable to capture it in great detail or within close proximity, but it was enough to recognize its anomalous nature. Murray and his NASA colleagues said they believed Peggy to be either a moon in the making or a moonlet disintegrating, as she got smaller during future imaging.
nasa.gov
Saturn’s rings consist of countless particles of ice and rock that orbit within the Roche Limit, an area where the planet’s gravitational force becomes so strong it rips apart small celestial bodies, such as asteroids and meteors. Typically, these particles will coalesce to form moons, but Saturn’s pull prevents this, instead maintaining their orbit. These small lunar building blocks are sometimes referred to as moonlets.
At first, scientists believed Peggy might have been a full-fledged moon, disrupting the flow of Saturn’s orbiting moonlets, but this theory was discounted because they would have expected it to create more chaos.
According to NASA, it has been difficult to track Peggy, as she’s not always been where they expect her to be. And though scientists believe Peggy may have been a nascent moon at one point, she still remains within the not-fully-explained category of Saturn’s features.
Strange Features In Images From Cassini Spacecraft
The Cassini spacecraft gave us quite a bit of new information about Saturn’s many moons, including the fact that some of them could potentially support life. The Huygens probe, carried by the Cassini spacecraft, landed on Titan, a moon with a significant amount of surface water.
Another of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, is thought to contain vast oceans beneath a layer of ice on its surface. These discoveries have raised the question of whether there is a possibility of life on these moons, as well as some other interesting theories.
The most unusual moon in Saturn’s orbit is one known as Iapetus. This walnut-shaped satellite has some odd features which some believe are characteristic of an artificial satellite. One half of the moon is bright white, while the other side is dark black with almost no reflectivity. There is a ridge running along its equator that alternative theorists have likened to two independent half-shells welded together. Others have imagined it to possibly be a wall of sorts.
Some have pointed out that it’s odd shape resembles a dodecahedron, evidence of artificial construction compared to the more spherical shape of natural satellites. Further study of Iapetus’ lunar surface shows additional geometric features with lines just a little too straight to be the product of natural mechanisms.
David Icke has proposed the idea that Saturn’s rings are actually artificial, based largely on a book titled Ringmakers of Saturn. He says he believes that Saturn is a broadcasting system, amplifying a frequency that is directly tied to our perception of reality. He points to the similarity between the rings of Saturn and information encoded on a CD or DVD.
Icke says he believes this signal is malevolent and that it’s broadcasting a false reality. He says these satellites orbiting Saturn are electromagnetic vehicles creating the rings, and that one can see exhaust being emitted in the process. Icke says he believes Saturn used to be a star like the sun, but that it is now being used to resonate sound frequencies.
There are, in fact, strange radio signals being broadcast from Saturn which can be found on NASA’s website. Could these eerie tones, that sound like something straight out of a horror movie, actually have an effect on Earth and our consciousness?
Another bizarre discovery on Saturn that has puzzled scientists and alternative theorists alike, is the massive hexagonal storm on the planet’s north pole. This storm stretches over 20,000 miles wide and reaches down at least 60 miles into the planet’s atmosphere. Its distinctively straight sides show how the winds in this gaseous storm shift direction drastically, a phenomenon never observed before.
David Wilcock draws the connection between the storm’s shape and Hans Jenny’s discovery of colloidal suspension. Jenny showed the way that sound frequencies create geometric patterns in solutions where particles are suspended in water and gas.
Could there be a connection between Icke’s theory of Saturn as a frequency transmitter and this massive hexagonal storm on the its north pole?
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Nemesis Star Theory; Does the Sun Have an Evil Twin?
Many people remain anxious about the threat posed from a hidden nemesis planet, known as Nibiru, that has been prophesied to collide with Earth. Though many of the proposed dates for this collision have come and gone, there is another celestial body that may be more likely to lead to an apocalyptic event: The Nemesis Star.
The Nemesis Star Theory
Binary star systems occur frequently and are actually more common than single stars. At least that’s what we thought, until a recent hypothesis proposed the possibility that every star starts out as a binary pair or multi-pair system. While the theory hasn’t been confirmed, there is significant evidence that our Sun likely has a twin, an evil twin.
The majority of stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, which are a fifth of the size of the sun and up to 50 times fainter. These types of stars are pretty commonly paired with another star in a binary system, leading astronomers to believe that Nemesis would be the Sun’s red dwarf star companion. But due to the small size and faintness of these stars, they can be hard to find, making Nemesis all the more elusive.
binary stars courtesy wired.com
This star is thought to be responsible for 12 cyclical extinction events on Earth, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. The Nemesis Star Theory’s roots can be traced to two paleontologists, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, who noticed that there was a periodicity to major die-outs throughout Earth’s history, occurring in 26 million year intervals. This led to a number of astrophysicists and astronomers, postulating their own Nemesis Star hypotheses.
So how would the sun’s twin be responsible for mass extinctions? The Nemesis Star Theory proposed the idea that the Earth’s binary twin must be in a large 1.5 light-year orbit, retaining just enough gravitational pull between it and the Sun so as not to drift off. But the issue with the orbit of Nemesis is the possibility that it occasionally passes through a cloud of icy debris on the fringe of our solar system, known as the Oort Cloud.
Don’t Perturb the Oort
The Oort Cloud is a theoretical sphere that is believed to orbit our solar system, consisting of planetesimals, the small icy building blocks of planets, comets, and asteroids. These planetesimals are sticky and collide with each other until they become large enough to have a significant gravitational pull, eventually becoming as large as a moon or a planet. They also create asteroids and comets which can be knocked out of orbit and sent hurtling toward the center of the solar system, crashing into planets.
There is a binary star system that once passed close enough to nearly perturb the Oort, and it was likely visible from Earth. Scholz’s Star made a flyby some 70,000 years ago, at a distance of 50,000 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance from Earth to the Sun. The Oort is thought to extend from anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000 AUs and is believed to contain up to two trillion celestial objects. Astronomers are 95% certain that Shulz’s star passed within half of a light-year of us, possibly perturbing the Oort, though apparently not enough to cause a mass extinction event.
Comets are believed to exist within the Oort and are the product of a thief model, a give-and-take of celestial bodies between stars when they’re formed. In this process, comets get pulled back and forth between the gravitational field of stars. It was for this reason that the Oort was theorized, due to the number of comets coming from it, there had to have been a sibling star that pulled them out to the Oort.
The Oort courtesy of space-facts.com
Astronomers also found a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a region just before the Oort that also contains icy, celestial bodies. This planet, named Sedna, orbits the Sun in a long, drawn-out elliptical path and is one of potentially hundreds. Sedna may help to explain the Nemesis star theory, in that its far-flung orbit was likely caused by our Sun’s twin, pulling it out as it drifted off into the depths of space. Imagine if instead of 9 planets in our solar system, there were a few hundred?
So where is this Nemesis star? Several years ago, the E.U. launched the wonderfully named, Gaia satellite, to map out the stars in the Milky Way and look specifically at stars that have had a close encounter with our solar system or that might come close in the future. But whether or not Nemesis will be found is unknown; it’s possible that it could make a return for the next mass extinction, or it is possible that it drifted off, perturbing the Oort of another star.
