Our solar system is a fantastically bizarre place. There are worlds as varied as our imagination can grasp — in fact, they exhibit features we never imagined before we saw them up close. Storms larger than planets, moons with undersurface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that occasionally swap places…
… and that’s just at Saturn. But of all these, if I had to pick, I’d say the strangest place in the entire solar system would be the ringed planet’s distant moon Hyperion. Why? Well, maybe this will help: in September, when the Cassini spacecraft was within just 88,000 km (54,000 miles) of the weird little moon, it snapped this picture:
Just looking at it, you get a sense of strangeness, don’t you? It’s little, only about 270 km (170 miles), but packed into that tiny moon is a Universe of weird. It looks like a sponge! Or more like a piece of packing foam that’s been pinged by a BB gun. It has a very low density — about half that of liquid water, even less dense than water ice, indicating it must not be entirely solid. It’s porous, like a sponge, or a pile of rubble.
Read More: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/02/the-solar-systems-weirdest-moon/
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