Scientists have today announced that they have discovered a massive ring around Saturn. It's thought that the ring is made up of dust and debris from a moon called Iapetus, which orbits 3,500,000 km from Saturn. Iapetus' two-tone shading has been a mystery until now, with light impacts seemingly explaining both the origin of the ring and the colour of the moon.
The ring itself is big enough to fit the Earth inside it 1,000,000,000 (one billion) times, and has been forming over millions of years.
Such a discovery is heartening to see- we are still learning about our own solar system, despite being able to see colossal events occurring trillions of miles away. As a species we are creating knowledge from the matter around us and generating increasingly more accurate models of the way the Universe works. Certainly more focus needs to be put on Science and astronomy, and less on becoming more of a green planet and cutting carbon emissions.
In fact, cutting Carbon emissions is an entirely pointless waste of time. If global warming projections are accurate then it was already too late to save the planet by cutting emissions in the 70s and 80s, let alone three or four decades after that. Instead of investing millions of pounds into ridiculous propaganda like 'Earth day' and 'the great switch off' maybe some more money should be poured into fringe research into cooling the core of the Earth, deflecting the Sun's heat through mirrors in space or adapting to live at warmer temperatures. These sound like ideas from the sci-fi world but realistically it's our only option. Or possibly dark matter generated from the LHC when (if) it gets up and running again.
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