Pop artist and tongue-wagger Miley Cyrus may want to get her heavenly bodies straight. She posted a picture of a new tattoo to Instagram with the caption “
The pro-Saturn factions are correct. “Jupiter has relatively dark rings,” wrote John O’Byrne, an astronomer at the University of Sydney, in an email to The Washington Post. But it requires special equipment to spot Jupiter’s faint halo, he said, “unlike Saturn’s rings that can be seen in a very small telescope. This definitely looks like Saturn.”
In fact, some of the rings in the Jovian system are so hard to spot that they’ve earned the name “The Gossamer Rings of Jupiter.” Saturn’s thicker rings are made of orbiting ice and rock particles, which can be the size of a tractor-trailer. Astronomers believe that Jupiter’s rings are the dusty remnants of meteoroids, left after crashing into the gas giant’s moons.
With apologies to Miley, Lil’ Saturn will have to do.