Dec 10 2009
Looking Farther (68) – A Foam Moon
The above is certainly a moon, but what moon is it?
Answer: Tethys. It orbits Saturn.
Looks quite a bit like a ball of styrofoam. And it must be. To hang in space like that.
Yet celestial bodies don’t “hang.” That word reflects the perceptual habits of minds confined to a land-based life in a strong gravitational field.
Tethys is not so much hanging as it is traveling along a vector of velocity sufficiently great enough to keep the acceleration provided by Saturn’s mass from pulling in “down.” In, really.
Hang. Down. Fall. What’s in a word? A superstructure of unseen experience, both personal and collective.
Of course, any Aussie readers could easily dismiss my ruminations this way: What the heck does he know, he’s hanging on the underside of our planet. Too much blood must have rushed into his head.
[photo thanks to NASA]
