TAW@S1-A@sri-unix (12/17/82)
From: Tom Wadlow <TAW at S1-A> I talked with Hoagland at Baycon a few weeks ago, and he says that the data from the Stanford radiotelescope is still being analyzed. They plan to use the Very Large Array soon, and he spoke of a television special sometime early next year. For those of you that have not read the Analog article, the story is this: One of the Voyager experiments heard a series of radio-energy bursts as it approached Saturn. These bursts were very broad banded (i.e. they seemed to be present no matter what frequency the Voyager reciever was listening to) and found to be periodic. The calculated period was approximately 10 hours 10 minutes. That fact, plus the postulation that the lower frequencies heard would not have been able to punch through the Saturnian atmosphere, lead some people at JPL to conclude that the source is in orbit in the ring plane. Further analysis also seems to show that there is only one object making all this noise, which means that this thing is releasing megawatt (or even gigawatt, if the band of transmission is much greater than the band of the Voyager reciever) quantities of energy into the rings occasionally (on the order of hours). Further confirmation was sought. The Voyager Photopolarimetry experiment data was checked (This is the experiment where the light from Delta Scorpii was measured as it passed behind the rings, to determine thickness). The PPS found a football stadium sized gap in the B ring, smack in the center of a 3000 mile wide "solid" (no light got through) band. Resonances with the known moons do not account for the gap (There are gaps that are caused by each of the moons). The period of an object in this gap would be 10 hours 9 minutes and 50 some odd seconds. There is quite a bit of speculation as to what the "thing" is. One favorite of Hoagland's is a Primordial Black Hole (PBH). The model in that case would be a black hole that has cleared a space in the rings, or possibly caused the rings to begin with, by repeatedly bashing into a moonlet. It would be nourished by occasionally sucking in ring material, so that it would not evaporate (a la Stephen Hawking and his fuzzy black holes). One feature of this explanation is that it might explain the braided rings. If a PBH is releasing massive quantities of energy into the rings, it must be boosting a large number of particles into a higher orbit, or even past Saturn escape velocity. If this is so, then there is a "wind" blowing away from Saturn in the ring plane, making the braids form for purely aerodynamic reasons. Another interesting feature is this: if we have found a PBH in our own back yard, chances are, they are fairly common. This would explain the missing mass in the universe necessary to account for the Big Bang. Other explanations (he spent much less time on these, so I don't have as much info) might be a metal moonlet that occasionally short circuits the two big semi-solid rings, which would act like a giant capacitor. A magnetic monopole. Or...... an artifact. If you wanted to attract somebodies attention, one way to do it might be to make a ring around a big planet. And put a noisy radio source in the ring. One thing that Voyager observed was that the signals were broadbanded and randomly polarized as it approached, but narrow banded and circularly polarized as it left. If you wanted to make a space beacon that would attract attention even if you didn't know that you should be listening for it, alternating between those two modes would be a pretty good design. Another point that Hoagland mentions is that some of the Voyager evidence (I don't remember which as I don't have the article handy) points to the fact that the rings are relatively new, on the order of only 100 million years. And that they are being dissipated, and have only some millions of years left. They are not stable, as we once thought they were. One final thought: (mine, not his) UC Berkeley prof Luis Alvarez claims that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant meteor impact about 63 million years ago. In geologic terms this is just about the same time that Saturns rings were formed. And it was the death of the dinosaurs and the change in climate that allowed the mammals of that time to evolve into us. Think about it. --Tom
CSvax:Pucc-H:Physics:els (12/19/82)
Maybe we should put a massive effort into showing that this must be
some truly exotic object, then NASA might get enough money to really do
things!!!!
Along the lines of possible artifacts, does anyone know what came
of those researchers who have been spending years enhancing the Viking
photos of what seem at first glance to be a pyramid in one case, and a
gigantic face in another. I think that I heard they showed the 'face'
to be a natural random formation, just as on Earth some mountains show
'faces' from certain angles.
It might also be interesting to note that the upper limit that was
given for the age of Saturn's rings roughly coincides with the time when
Mars suffered its ecological disaster!!!!
els[Eric Strobel]
pur-ee!pur-phy!els