Roche Division
The separation between the A Ring and the F Ring has been named the Roche Division in honor of the French physicist Édouard Roche. The Roche Division should not be confused with the Roche limit, a physical concept that describes when a large object gets so close to a planet (such as Saturn) that the planet's tidal forces will pull it apart. Lying at the outer edge of the main ring system, the Roche Division is in fact close to Saturn's Roche limit, which is why the rings have been unable to accrete into a moon.
Like the Cassini Division, the Roche Division is not empty but contains a sheet of material. The character of this material is similar to the tenuous and dusty D, E, and G Rings. Two locations in the Roche Division have a higher concentration of dust than the rest of the region. These were discovered by the Cassini probe imaging team and were given temporary designations: R/2004 S 1, which lies along the orbit of the moon Atlas; and R/2004 S 2, centered at 138,900 km from Saturn's center, inward of the orbit of Prometheus.
Read more about this topic: Rings Of Saturn
Famous quotes containing the word division:
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