Sentences with phrase «largest planetary ring»

Not exact matches

By drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180 - kilometer - wide crater rim, researchers also hope to nail down the processes that form «peak rings»: hallmarks of the largest impact craters, which planetary scientists have seen elsewhere in the solar system but which erosion has erased from other big craters on Earth.

The icy fragments would have encircled the solar system's second largest planet as rings and eventually spalled off small moons of their own that are still there today, says Robin Canup, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo..

Haumea is a much larger object further out in the solar system, and together with the centaurs can help scientists learn more about planetary rings in general, writes Amanda A. Sickafoose, astronomer at MIT and the South African Astronomical Observatory, in a Nature commentary.

© John Whatmough — larger image (Artwork from Extrasolar Visions, used with permission) Planetary candidate «b» depicted with rings and an icy moon, as imagined by Whatmough.

© Walter Myers — larger image (Artwork from Computergraphic Vistas, used with permission) View of a ringed, planetary candidate «b» from a rocky moon, as imagined by Myers (more).

© John Whatmough — larger image (Artwork from Extrasolar Visions, used with permission) Planetary candidate «b» with moons and dust ring around old and swollen Aldebaran A, as imagined by Whatmough.