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The Saturnian moon Rhea may have a tenuous ring system consisting of three narrow, relatively dense bands within a particulate disk. This would be the first discovery of rings around a moon. The potential discovery was announced in the journal Science on March 6, 2008.
In November 2005 the Cassini orbiter found that Saturn's magnetosphere is depleted of energetic electrons near Rhea. According to the discovery team, the pattern of depletion is best explained by assuming the electrons are absorbed by solid material in the form of an equatorial disk of particles perhaps several decimeters to approximately a meter in diameter and that contains several denser rings or arcs.
Subsequent targeted optical searches of the putative ring plane from several angles by Cassini's narrow-angle camera failed to find any evidence of the expected ring material, and in August 2010 it was announced that Rhea was unlikely to have rings, and that the reason for the depletion pattern, which is unique to Rhea, is unknown.
However, an equatorial chain of bluish marks on the Rhean surface suggests past impacts of deorbiting ring material and leaves the question unresolved.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Rings of Rhea
Rhea, in Greek mythology, the Titaness daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus as well as sister and wife to Cronus. In early traditions, she is known as "the mother of gods" and therefore is strongly associated with Gaia and Cybele, who have similar functions. The classical Greeks saw her as the mother of the Olympian gods and goddesses, but not as an Olympian goddess in her own right. According to Hesiod, Cronus sired six children by Rhea: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus in that order. Gaia and Uranus told Cronus that just as he had overthrown his own father, he was destined to be overcome by his own child; so as each of his children was born, Cronus swallowed them. Rhea, Uranus and Gaia devised a plan to save the last of them, Zeus.
Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly swallowed; Rhea hid her infant son Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida.
Her attendants, the warrior-like Kouretes and Dactyls, acted as a bodyguard for the infant Zeus, helping to conceal his whereabouts from his father. According to Plato, Phorcys, Cronus and Rhea were the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Rhea (mythology)
I never do anything fun, because I'm a housewife. I hate that word 'housewife.' I prefer to be called 'domestic goddess'.
Roseanne Barr