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Reports
Submitted on July 20, 2007 The Dark Side of the Rings of Uranus
1 Astronomy Department, 601 Campbell Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed.
The rings of Uranus are oriented edge-on to Earth in 2007 for the first time since their 1977 discovery. This provides a rare opportunity to observe their dark (unlit) side, where dense rings darken to near invisibility, but faint rings become much brighter. We present a ground-based infrared image of the unlit side of the rings that shows that the system has changed dramatically since previous views. A broad cloud of faint material permeates the system, but is not correlated with the well-known narrow rings or with the embedded dust belts imaged by Voyager. Although some differences can be explained by the unusual viewing angle, we conclude that the dust distribution within the system has changed significantly since the 1986 Voyager spacecraft encounter and occurs on much larger scales than has been seen in other planetary systems.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
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