It’s a small story that got almost no attention, but Nadia Drake, writing in Science News, found a way to tell it engagingly–linking a distant era in human history to a cataclysmic event far away in our solar system.
The Tracker missed it when her story appeared ten days ago, but Drake tipped us off (we love it when that happens), calling her piece “a novelty story.”
The gist is that astronomers have found ripples in Saturn’s rings and deduced that they were caused in the late 1300s when a comet sailed close enough to break up and drop debris into the rings. Drake cites a speculation that the comet was pulled into orbit around Saturn and, some 50 years later, swung close enough to disintegrate completely, creating another set of ripples.
The data came from the Cassini spacecraft and were reported at an astronomy conference in France.
-Boyce Rensberger
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