Chapter 18 (Saturn’s Rings II): The Spokes

October 2029, Jinsheng State, Liang Country

When the Lingguang probe approached the asteroid Ling Shen, an accident occurred, destroying all electrical equipment and leading to the project's failure.

Daphne Braun had devoted herself wholeheartedly, her curiosity about Ling Shen boundless, only to be met with this cold and unforgiving result.

Michael Max understood Daphne’s feelings well. Space exploration was a lengthy and risky endeavor; a tiny mistake or some unforeseen accident could doom everything.

Michael had failed more times than he could count, but for Daphne, this was her first.

Because of his work, Michael frequently traveled between Rocket City in Sa State and the Liang Aerospace Agency’s research center in Jinsheng.

Two days ago, Michael and Professor Braun had come to Jinsheng for a conference. He convinced Daphne to come along, suggesting she visit her alma mater and clear her mind.

Daphne had graduated from Jinsheng Institute of Technology, an institution with a longstanding partnership with the Liang Aerospace Agency, producing many talents in astronomy and space science.

Martha, an ever-resourceful reporter, somehow learned of Daphne Braun’s itinerary and arranged to meet her for afternoon tea at an open-air café. After some seemingly aimless conversation, Martha leaned forward, lowered her voice, and asked:

“I heard Michael met with Prince Harufa. Did he mention it to you?”

After Daphne confirmed, Martha pressed on:

“Daphne, my dear Doctor of Astronomy, can you explain in layman’s terms what experiment Michael plans to conduct on Enceladus?”

Daphne knew that Michael’s company, IceBay, had launched a probe targeting Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The stated aim was to research signs of life beneath its icy crust.

She had once asked Michael out of curiosity whether the experiment’s sole purpose was to search for life. Michael only smiled and claimed it was top secret.

Martha, realizing Michael kept even Daphne in the dark, was both surprised and disappointed. This only heightened Daphne’s curiosity. Under further questioning, Martha revealed some of her own findings.

One of Martha’s sources, a researcher at Surlei University in Country F, claimed that Liang had long kept secret a Nikola Tesla theory capable of creating a super energy source.

The research team from Country F had studied all solar system bodies and concluded that Enceladus was the optimal site to build such an energy source.

Daphne Braun was deeply astonished. In a flash, she recalled fragmentary comments from Michael that seemed to corroborate this. Given Michael’s character, how could he be satisfied with merely surviving in a Martian capsule?

He had always been fascinated by Mars’s core, the subsurface ice, and the dry ice of the Martian south pole. Could he really have mastered the theoretical foundation for creating a super energy source?

As Daphne pondered, Martha threw out another startling question:

“Daphne, I can feel how deeply you love Michael. Does your love have boundaries? In other words, no matter what he does, would you always stand by his side?”

Daphne started, looked up at Martha, and raised her chin, as if to ask—such as?

“For example, what if Michael’s installation on Enceladus might destroy Saturn’s rings?” Martha asked, her tone meaningful.

“That’s absolutely unacceptable! No matter the motive, no one has the right to destroy Saturn’s rings,” Daphne replied forcefully.

Daphne Braun’s hypothesis about a Martian cataclysm began to take shape during her university years. In gathering evidence for her theory, she paid special attention to Saturn and its moons.

Saturn is a gas giant, its surface devoid of rock. According to Daphne’s theory, Saturn itself could not explode. Yet, Saturn has the most moons of any planet in the solar system.

Currently, Saturn boasts 149 known satellites, while more massive Jupiter has only 95. Saturn’s satellites outnumber those of all other planets combined. Where did all these moons come from?

Michael and Professor Braun attended a seminar at the Jinsheng Aerospace Research Center, discussing the engineering feasibility of the lunar mass anomaly experiment. During a break, Michael explained his Enceladus plan to Professor Braun.

Enceladus lies within Saturn’s E ring, its semi-major axis 238,000 kilometers, and Saturn’s radius is over 62,000 kilometers.

If a base were built on Enceladus’s equator, and a small spacecraft launched toward Saturn, towing a sufficiently long carbon fiber tube to remain connected to the base, the spacecraft’s orbit could be adjusted so that, at 1,000 kilometers above Saturn’s surface, its angular velocity matched Enceladus’s.

Because Enceladus is tidally locked to Saturn, the base on its equator would always face Saturn’s center point, unchanging.

“A carbon fiber tube about 175,000 kilometers long, greater than the wavelength of superluminal waves—so that’s why you say Enceladus is the best place in the solar system to build a superluminal wave power station,” Professor Braun remarked.

“It’s not just the distance,” Michael replied. “The key is the presence of Saturn’s rings between Enceladus and Saturn. The carbon fiber tube, upon receiving superluminal wave radiation, heats up, causing the water ice in the rings directly below to evaporate.”

Michael emphasized that the inner rings of Saturn rotate faster. The heated carbon fiber tube wouldn’t just melt ice blocks in a straight line along its normal, but, as the rings rotate at high speed, it would absorb water vapor evenly from the entire disk. Water droplets would condense around the tube, forming the structures needed to boost the power station’s output.

Professor Braun considered Michael’s plan with his usual rigor, remarking, “Last time, you told Mr. E that Saturn had a natural scaffold for a superluminal wave power station. I thought you meant the rings. Your plan is theoretically feasible, but the risks of extracting water from the rings must be carefully calculated and evaluated.”

Looking at the imaginative explorer before him, Professor Braun thought, “So, truth really is stranger than fiction.”

After delving into Nikola Tesla’s gravitational theory, the professor had devised another ingenious experiment, aside from the lunar mass anomaly one—choosing Saturn’s rings as the site.

Saturn’s rings are divided into several bands, stretching from a few thousand kilometers from the planet to several hundred thousand, composed of ice grains ranging from micrometers to meters in size, with an average thickness of only ten meters.

Mainstream theory uses Newton’s law of universal gravitation to calculate the orbital periods and speeds of the rings’ different layers.

According to these calculations, the thin “disk” of Saturn’s rings does not revolve as a single unit; the inner rings, subject to greater gravity, rotate faster than the outer rings, which rotate more slowly.

Nikola Tesla’s gravitational theory, however, suggests otherwise!

He posited that a body’s gravitational attraction depends on the intensity of energy it displaces. In an ideal gravitational field, the gravitational event is abstracted to a central mass attracting an orbiting object—like Saturn and its moons.

This abstraction assumes that the energy displaced by the orbiting object comes entirely from the central energy source’s radiation. In this case, Tesla’s energy-based gravity and Newton’s law yield identical results.

However, if the radiation source is not just a point at the center but also a luminous “disk,” then the orbiting object receives energy both from the central point—falling off with the square of the distance—and from surrounding objects, so the displaced energy is the sum of both.

In Newtonian gravity, environmental energy outside the point source is irrelevant, but in Tesla’s theory, the object experiences greater gravitational force as a result.

In the 1970s, spiral galaxies—also “bright disks”—were observed to display a “peculiar phenomenon”: Stars near the galaxy’s edge do not slow down as Newton’s law predicts; instead, their speeds are nearly uniform.

Since these speeds exceed Newtonian predictions, there must be more unseen mass. If the law of gravity isn’t to be changed, it must be postulated that “dark matter” exists—five to ten times as much as visible matter, to account for the observed discrepancies. Thus arose the dark matter hypothesis.

Returning to Saturn’s rings: Before 1980, the orbital periods of the rings were estimated using Newton’s law—inner rings faster, outer slower.

Because the rings are made of tiny ice particles, indistinguishable through telescopes, astronomers still do not know the exact period of each ring.

Voyager 2 observed many large, spoke-like structures on Saturn’s B ring—called “spokes.” The name is apt; they resemble the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

These “spokes” span several ring bands and are distributed along the normal (vertical to Saturn). Their rotational period is easy to identify, and what startled astronomers is that their dynamics violate Newton’s law: the spokes do not slow at the edges but maintain nearly uniform angular velocity, like bicycle spokes.

Mainstream scientists, desperate to defend Newton’s law, offered an explanation: the spokes aren’t attached to the rings but float above them. The spokes are uniform in speed, but the rings below them still rotate faster inside and slower outside.

In other words, the spokes and the rings beneath them rotate independently—a “brilliant” way to preserve both Newton’s law and the dark matter hypothesis.

But who is right? Experiment is the only test of truth!

Professor Braun’s experiment was to distribute radio-frequency markers along the normal direction from the outer to inner rings, then use the signals to determine each ring’s period and speed.

Prediction from Newton’s law: From the inner rings outward, the markers’ periods lengthen, angular velocities decrease.

Prediction from Nikola Tesla’s gravitational theory: From inner to outer, the markers’ angular velocities are nearly identical.

If Tesla is correct, the anomalous behavior of Saturn’s B ring spokes will match exactly the peculiar motion of stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way. In other words, if Tesla’s prediction holds, the dark matter hypothesis is unnecessary.

Moreover, the bright rings would rotate faster than theory predicts—just as the luminous spiral arms in galaxies host stars that move more quickly. Observations support this: stars in the bright arms move faster due to greater environmental radiation, boosting their speed.

Thus, the different rings around Saturn do not show the classic pattern of slower outer and faster inner orbits, but instead, like the B ring spokes (and the outer galaxy), all ring bands share the same angular velocity!

This “sheet of ice” that is Saturn’s rings spins as a unified “wheel,” with the “spokes” like bicycle wheel struts defying Newton’s law!

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Appended poetic lines:

Sleet falls, at first seeming to gather as scattered pearls. (Song Dynasty, Zhao Fan)
Therein the fine and the large compete in their variety. (Song Dynasty, Chen Pu)
Who can discern the wheel’s turning and shifting? (Song Dynasty, Master Zhengjue)
A single sheet of cold ice emerges from the forge. (Ming Dynasty, Zhu Duozhen)