Using infrared imagining, scientists have discovered a new, huge ring around Saturn. So diffused that you wouldn't see it if you were in it, and big enough that it would take a billion Earths to fill it.
Pretty impressive.
Though I must confess, I didn't find this as impressive as the event of March 10, 1977, by James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham, and Douglas J. Mink, who discovered that there were rings around another planet in our solar system.
And a great topic of party conversation:
So, who's that?
Why, that's Jim Elliot, the famous astronomer.
Yeah? Famous for what?
That's the man who discovered that there are rings around Uranus!
I used to work in a computer lab at... um... a major manufacturer of computer processors out in Hillsboro. Being lab rats, we could pretty much do what we wanted with the systems on the (private) lab network. One guy had an array of machines set up, one of which was named "URANUS_HAS_RINGS." When asked, he would say, "What? It's a scientifically known fact!"
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