Personal news, and JWST sees Saturn looking infraredly weird

July 3, 2023   Issue #585

Subscribers move me 

Personal Stuff

Because I’m a person

So, I have some big personal news, and it’s both good and bad, as news sometimes is: My wife and I are moving out of Colorado.

This was all set into motion back in September. As you may recall, SYFY Wire let me go, throwing my life into chaos. Losing a job, especially a steady one that’s the majority of your earnings, is painful at best and life-disrupting even on average.

In this case the impact was pretty big. The good news is that I contacted my old editor when I wrote for Slate, Laura Helmuth, who is now the Editor in Chief at Scientific American, and she responded quickly when I asked if I could write for them. That has of course helped hugely! [You can find all my articles here., including a new one published Friday about the Earth getting to aphelion on July 6!]

But the bad news is that despite that, we have to move. My wife and I first came to Colorado in 2007 when I got the book deal for Death from the Skies!, and after a few years we moved to a new house with her folks. In September though, with the financial situation changed, her parents decided to move to a warmer clime (Colorado can be, um, a bit tough in the winter), so we decided we’d all move out of the house.

After some lengthy discussions, my wife and I decided that, if we had to move anyway, we should look at places where we’d like to be for the long haul. She’s a gardener, and that’s also a tough prospect in Colorado (it’s extremely dry here, and the Sun tends to bake a lot of plants in the summer). We went back and forth a lot, but finally settled on heading back to Virginia. We both grew up there, and met at UVa in Charlottesville. We miss that area, and so, as much as we love the big mountains and ridiculous amount of amazing wildlife we see here, we’re heading east. We found a place in a rural area and we’ll be making that our new home.

And it’s happening now: We leave Colorado on Thursday! We’ll be itinerant for a few weeks, since we agreed to give the current owners of the Virginia house extra time to pack up and move themselves. We’ll be visiting friends and family for a while before moving in. The hardest part will be shuttling all over the eastern half of the country with two rambunctious dogs in the car. Hopefully the weather will be nice enough that we can keep the windows cracked. Dogs are machines for turning food into noxious gas.

I don’t expect any interruptions in the newsletter; I haven’t missed an issue yet and I don’t plan on starting now! I have a few written in advance and I’ll be writing on the road as well. So everything should be fine on that end.

Importantly, thanks to all of you for subscribing to this newsletter. That means a lot to me. Thanks even more to the folks who signed up for the paid subscriptions, who have helped tremendously over the years. And a special thanks to the Galaxy Class subbies, who pitched in last year when all this happened. They were critical in my being able to bridge the gap between losing SYFY and gaining SciAm, and it would’ve been far, far worse without their generosity.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it

Y’all must know by now that Saturn is my favorite planet (besides the one you see when you look down). It’s just so beautiful, whether you’re looking at it through binoculars, a telescope, or seeing images from big ‘scopes or even spacecraft. It was the first thing I ever looked at through a telescope when I was a tot, and I do sometimes wax lyrical about it. The hardest part of writing my book was keeping the Saturn chapter under 25,000 words.

So I am vibrating with excitement to show you the new images of the ringed wonder taken by JWST! And they’re… weird. As expected.

Whoaaaaa. Not the usual view, is it?

That’s because JWST sees infrared light, and things are different here. But there’s more going on than that…

Saturn has a lot of methane and hydrogen gas in its atmosphere. Molecules of gas absorb light at fairly specific ranges of wavelengths (colors), and astronomers used a filter that looks in the wavelengths methane and hydrogen absorb. So, even though sunlight hits Saturn, the molecules absorb that infrared wavelength so very little reflects back to us. The planet looks dark.

The rings, though, are made of water ice. That absorbs various infrared wavelengths as well, but not the one the filter lets through. They merrily reflect that wavelength, so we see the rings shiny and bright. Not only that, three moons — Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys, from top to bottom — are visible on the left of the planet as well.

The different parts of the rings are visible too. The B ring is the brightest here (as well as in visible light), with the A ring outside it and the C ring inside. Each section is divided into zillions of ringlets, and you can see quite a few here. Gaps carved by the gravity of the moons are easily seen, as well as the usually faint F ring outside the A ring. Impressive.

Know someone who would love having their mind blown by these shots of Saturn? Share this post with ‘em!

I have to admit, though, that this is a rare circumstance where I actually like the raw image better than the processed one. Take a look:

Cooool. “Raw” means right off the camera, with no processing to remove things like pixels zapped by cosmic rays and camera artifacts (some pixels are more sensitive than others, for example, and you need to compensate for that). You can see the planet, barely, with the contrast and brightness set this way, but I love how the rings are just floating eerily in space, a gap in them where the planet blocks our view of the far side.

These images were taken to see if moons could be seen when the rings are so bright and can swamp fainter objects. It’s possible JWST will find new moons, too. We’ve already found over 140, but there are more out there.

And with this the ‘scope has now observed all four gas giants in the solar system: Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune were targeted earlier. But there will be more observations; these planets change all the time, so JWST and Hubble will continue to look at them so we can learn more about these enormous worlds.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!