More Saturnian Weirdness

Something big and weird punched through Saturn's F-ring recently. Here's a picture.

To help you make sense of the image: the thing was approaching from below the ring, blasted through the ring and left a plume of material pointing toward the upper right hand corner of the picture, the plume is casting a shadow toward the lower lefthand corner.

No one knows what it is. Other than a great big space rock, probably.

I learned about it by listening to Phil Platt, of Bad Astronomy, on Coast to Coast last night (I got the pix from his site as well). For those of you not in the know, Coast to Coast is the gloriously strange radio show devoted to alien abductions, the Hollow Earth theory, the Taos Hum, Bigfoot, etc. It's about 80% silly, 20% interesting.

This is from the 20% interesting bit.

It comes on the heels of the comet slamming into Jupiter last month. Do I sense a pattern here? Did some passing object perturb the orbits of all those frozen space rocks at the edge of the Solar System? Are we about to be bombarded with shrapnel from the Oort Cloud?

Stay tuned.