NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of an icy object within the rings of Saturn, possibly revealing the formation process of a new moon.
Images were taken with Cassini's narrow angle camera on April 15, 2013.
Pictures show "disturbances" at the edge of the planet's A ring, the outermost of Saturn's bright rings, according to NASA press release.
One of the disturbances is in an arc that measures approximately 1,200 km long and 10 km wide, and is 20 percent brighter than its surrounding ring, according to the release.
Scientists believe the protuberances and the arc are a result of gravitational effect of a surrounding object.
The object will most likely not grow anymore, and could even be falling apart, according to the release.
The process of its formation and movement is important to our understanding of how Saturn's icy moons, like the Titan and Enceladus, might have former in larger rings many years ago.
It also shows how Earth and other planets might have formed and migrated away from the Sun.
"We have not seen anything like this before," said Carl Murray of Queen Mary University of London, the report's lead author. "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."
The object has informally been named Peggy, and is too small to be seen in images.
Experts believe it is likely no more than around a half mile in diameter, according to the release.
A number of Saturn's moons are mainly made up of ice, as are the particles that make Saturn's rings.
"Witnessing the possible birth of a tiny moon is an exciting, unexpected event," said Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. According to Spilker, Cassini's orbit will move closer to the outer edge of the A ring in late 2016 and provide an opportunity to study Peggy in more detail and perhaps even image it.
Click here to view the full image.
The process of moon formation in Saturn's rings likely ended with Peggy, since the planet's rings are now most likely too depleted to make additional moons.
Murray and his colleagues are wringing from the observations all they can learn since they may never get the chance to observe this process again, according to the release.
"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 Cassini-Huygens mission is a "cooperative project" of NASA, the Italian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, according to NASA.
JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Details on the observations were published this week by the journal Icarus.
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