New Hubble Pictures of Planets


The original goal of Cassini-Huygens was to study Saturn and its large, misty, tortured, moon Titan. Titan, the second-largest moon in our Solar System, after Ganymede of Jupiter, is a world long-shrouded in mystery, hiding behind a thick orange veil, and slashed with hydrocarbon lakes and seas. However, there are other enticing moons known to circle the ringed planet. Saturn's mid-sized icy moons (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Phoebe) are enchanting worlds. Each one of these frozen little moons reveals an interesting and unique geology. So far, Saturn is known to sport 62 icy moons! The Birthstone of Sagittarius is the Lapis Lazuli. Lapis Lazuli is one of the birthstones of this global thinker. Lapis is a stone for the third eye and deepens the connection to your own inner wisdom, intuition and truth. It is an opaque blue stone with the magical power of the earth to help manifest those creative impulses and insights into something tangible. Lapis was one of the sacred stones used in abundance in Egyptian jewelry in combination with gold and coral. The team's findings can also be applied to exoplanets, which are planets that circle stars beyond our own Sun. Some super-Earth exoplanets, which are rocky planets more massive than our own, have been proposed as "water worlds" covered with churning oceans. Could they have life? Perhaps. The potential would certainly be there. Dr. Vance and his team believe laboratory experiments and more sophisticated modeling of exotic oceans might help to find answers to these very profound questions.