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Space

Why Saturn's inner moons look like ravioli, cigars and potatoes

By Leah Crane

21 May 2018

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Saturn’s moon Pan has been described as a ravioli, an empanada, or a pierogi

NASA

Saturn’s ridged moons may have gotten their weird shapes from a moonlet demolition derby. The small inner moons have a range of strange shapes: Pan and Atlas are disks with bulging middles like ravioli, Prometheus is elongated like a cigar, and others look like misshapen potatoes. They may have formed when pairs of smaller moonlets crashed into one another and merged.

To figure out whether mergers are a plausible explanation for Saturn’s menagerie of moons, Adrien Leleu at the University of Bern…

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