REM@MIT-MC (12/19/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> Aha, the regularily-periodic bursting of the radio source is explained nicely by my idea of an out-of-plane ringlet or moonlet colliding with the rest of the material in adjoining rings, or two non-circular ringlets or moonlets or one of each, with a burst at each orbit. It's analagous to comets producing meteor showers that we have each year but which produe really big showers every 33 years or whatever the orbital period of the comet was. The ring object would wipe itself out in 200 million years <number pulled out of my hat> but with the rings only 65 million years old it hasn't wiped itself out yet. -- But I really like the black-hole theory too. I guess we have to send a Galileo-class ship there to orbit long enough to find the truth. Now let's see, when does budget scrooge Stockman leave office? By the way, although there's no religious significance if the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and thus allowed mammals to take over and evolve humans also made a pretty ring for us to watch and do movies about (2001, silent running), but it does explain why such a rare event happens to have happend at the same time the rare event of the dinosaur extinction and our development occurred. In fact I might go so far as to speculate that whenever in the future we discover that our solar system is the only system in the whole galaxy with some property, that there's a direct casual link between that property and our evolution were, either one caused the other (like if there's a candy wrapper on the Moon but nowhere else, some astronaut probably put it there) or some common cause was involved (one comet did both rings of Saturn and our dinosaur extinction). Maybe the rings of Jupiter and Uranus were also caused by that comet, just Saturn was on the right side of the Sun. (Gee, maybe by tracing back tree rings in fossels we can date the Cretaceous Extinction to within a few years, then by tracing back the orbits of the planets to find when Saturn and Earth were on one side of the Sun with Jupiter and Uranus far away, we can get the exact month of the CE, and by checking geologic evidence such as meteor craters and biological evidence such as where the CE hit most strongly we can even find out what time of day it hit!! -- Yes, I'm out on a limb, but something truth is stranger than fiction! Black holes (probably truth) are stranger than ray guns (fantasy science fiction) for example.)