The birth of a new Saturn moon might just have been witnessed by astronomers on a NASA spacecraft, Newser reported.
In April 2013, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spotted what the LA Times describes as a "fuzzy blob" near one of the planet's rings and managed to capture spectacular photographs.
The probe showcases a bright arc about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) long and 6 miles (10 km) wide at the edge of Saturn's outermost ring (known as the A ring), Mother Nature Network reported.
The gravity of a small, icy object probably created the arc and some strange bumps nearby, possibly causing the birth of a newborn moon, a new study reported.
"We have not seen anything like this before," study lead author Carl Murray, of Queen Mary University of London, said in a statement. "We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right."
Dubbed as "Peggy," the object is at most 0.5 miles wide and not large enough to be seen in the images taken by Cassini so far.
However, researchers will get an opportunity in 2016 to make a more detailed study on Peggy as the spacecraft will move closer to the A ring's outer edge, NASA officials said. There will even be a better possibility of taking a clearer picture of the object.
"Saturn has more than 60 known moons. These satellites are quite diverse, ranging in size from the colossal Titan, which is nearly 1.5 times wider than Earth's moon, to tiny iceballs less than 1 mile across," MNN reported.
"Scientists think these moons formed from ice particles within the rings (which are composed almost entirely of water ice) and then moved outward, growing by combining with other nascent satellites along the way."
As Saturn may have finished making any more new moons, this new discovery offers researchers a unique opportunity.
"The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons," Murray said. "As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out."
The new study was published online on April 14 in the journal Icarus.
