Space may be the final frontier, but Matthew Hedman and Robert Chancia are working to demystify it.
Hedman, who works in physics at the University of Idaho, and Chancia, a UI graduate student in physics, both study planetary rings.
“This specific project is related to trying to understand how the rings around giant planets in the outer solar system work,” Hedman said.
Chancia and Hedman recently discovered data that suggests there is a new moon orbiting around Uranus.
“With this grant we were working on, the main goal was to determine higher components of Uranus’ gravity field,” Chancia said.
The project was built on data from the Cassini mission to Saturn and other research on Saturn’s rings. Chancia said a lot of the structures in Saturn’s rings are also seen in Uranus’. He also said while data for Uranus’ rings has been around for decades, no one has looked at it for a long time.
“We wanted to try and see if we could learn more about the ring’s environments and the properties of the planet,” Chancia said.
Hedman said one of the main features of a ring they look for are called “wakes.” Wakes give rings their characteristic wavy edge.
“Wakes are structures on the edges of rings that indicate gravitational effects,” Hedman said.
He said one common cause of these structures results from nearby moons. Hedman and Chancia didn’t develop this technique of looking for moons. Chancia said they applied the technique to new data from Uranus.
Chancia said he noticed these wake structures on one of Uranus’ rings.
“The idea was could we explain it with a model of the wake created by a nearby moon,” Chancia said.
He said the simple answer was yes — the data was consistent with the conclusion that a moon was governing the ring. Hedman said there are few other things that could create this characteristic pattern.
This is the first time someone has suggested there is a moon there.
“The moon is consistent with something that anyone else could have missed,” Hedman said.
However, Chancia said one of the biggest limiting factors to them confirming the theory is the hypothetical size of the moon. He said the data is consistent with a moon only two to seven kilometers in diameter.
The size of the moon puts it below the detected threshold for the images he is using, Chancia said. The background noise in the image makes the moon undetectable, he said.
“We’re right in the range of the noise — if it even exists,” Hedman said.
They said other scientists have access to higher quality images. Chancia said there’s even a chance the moons could have been seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.
“(Other scientists) are very good at finding moons around Uranus, and Neptune and Pluto,” Chancia said.
Hedman said it’s an ongoing effort to confirm the moons, but it’s within the range of possibility.
“The idea here is, if these moons are real they might explain why these rings are so narrow,” he said.
Hedman and Chancia said there are several other weird structures in the rings they plan on pursuing in the future.
“The rings have surprised us so many times — we’re never quite sure on these things,” Hedman said.
Carly Scott can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Idaho_Scotty