QUEEN MAB in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has a special effect on the people she visits in dreams. With pleasing coincidence, the moon named after her has its own special effect on its host planet, Uranus.
Uranus is circled by a blue ring, a rare colour probably created by Mab, which itself orbits Uranus inside the ring. Imke de Pater and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, say that the ring is probably made of ultrafine ice particles, too small to scatter long-wavelength infrared light but big enough to reflect visible wavelengths - especially at the blue end of the spectrum.
We only know of one other blue ring, Saturn's E-ring, and at the heart of that is also a moon, Enceladus. Both moons probably tint their rings by sweeping up larger bits of ice, while smaller ice particles are pushed out of the way by sunlight and magnetic fields (Science, vol 312, p 92).
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