December 22, 2005
New rings around Uranus. Go ahead and giggle, you'll hurt yourself holding it in.
Today NASA has found, with the help of the Hubble telescope, that there is a second, much larger, ring system around Uranus.
I'm a pretty big space geek in the general sense so I'm always excited when we learn new things about space in general. I'm always ecstatic when we learn new things about our Solar System as this is the first chunk of space we need to deal with before any of my, um, wilder dreams have a chance of becoming a reality.
To find that Uranus has a relatively young ring system is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it means that our Solar System is still being directly affected and modified. Sometimes I, and I think most people, tend to take the nine planets that we memorized in grade school and stick them into an absolute position. In other words, we know how things are. It's always gratifying to realize that there's a whole lot we're totally oblivious to even this close to home. It always makes me excited for what we'll find out next and when it will be good enough to make us get off our assess as a collective species and start getting some god damned work done out there.
Posted by morr at 05:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack