Re: Rings Around The Sun

On Mar 15, 2:18 pm, James Waldby <n...@xxxxx> wrote:
mensana...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 14, 9:04?pm, James Waldby <n...@xxxxx> wrote:
symphony wrote:
If the Solar System could be viewed or photographed from a space craft
located at point that was a
billion miles from the plane of the planets, would the asteroid belt
look as if it was a ring around the
sun? Would the photo in any way resemble Saturn and its rings? Does
NASA plan to launch a space
probe in such a direction or has it done so in the past?

An astronomy newsgroup probably will give you better
answers to these questions than will sci.math.

Was there something wrong with my answer?

(1) I hadn't seen your answer at the time I wrote mine.
(2) I was suggesting tat the OP post where their post is
on-topic, rather than here, where astronomy
is not the main subject.
(3) I'm not qualified to point out what's wrong with
your answer.

Should I have instead said "take Saturn's A ring
and stretch it until it's 3 times the size of
Earth's orbit"?

I think a comparison like that would be useful in addition
to, rather than instead of, what you wrote. BTW, I'm not
sure how much matter is in Saturn's rings. The asteroid
belt contains a few billion cubic miles of stuff.


Right off hand I would say that was a relatively significant
amount of "debris". Do you suppose that this debris reflects
sunlight so that, from a distance of 1 billion miles or so from
the ecliptic plane, it appears as a more or less solid band of light?

Could the Solar System, taken as a whole, look like a bigger more
majestic version of Saturn: which is a part of the Solar System?

Re your final question, yes: spacecraft Ulysses orbits the
sun at mean distance roughly 1.3 billion Km and 79 degrees
relative to the ecliptic.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_probehttp://helio.estec.esa.nl/u...

Also see 2 pictures labeled as "Some artist's representations
of Ulysses in it's orbit" near the end ofhttp://helio.estec.esa.nl/ulysses/resources_galleryorbit.html

--
-jiw


.

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