The tiny moon with the long reach  The entire universe in blog
form Aug. 2 2010 7:13 AM  The tiny moon with the long reach
When I was a kid, Saturn had one big, flat ring system divided
up into maybe three or four broad sections separated by gaps,
and that was it.  Turns out, we were wrong. Saturn has thousands
of rings made up of billions upon billions of tiny ice
particles. There aren't just a handful of gaps, there are
thousands of them, too, and there are moonlets in those gaps.
Those tiny moons tug and pull on the rings, distorting them into
weird and fantastic shapes. And "flat"? Not quite. The Cassini
mission apparently delights in showing us just how wrong we
were:  Phil Plait Phil Plait     This image from Cassini shows
Saturn's broad A ring, the one you can see in small telescopes
from Earth. On the right is the Encke Gap, a space carved out by
the tiny moon Pan. On the left is the narrower Keeler Gap, where
the even tinier moon Daphnis orbits Saturn. Daphnis is a lump,
only about 9 kilometers (5.5