S/2004 S 4
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provisional designation of an unconfirmed object seen orbiting Saturn
Key facts
- Discovered by
- CICLOPS Team
- Discovery date
- June 21, 2004
- Semi major axis
- ~140,100 km
- Eccentricity
- unknown, small
- Orbital period sidereal
- ~0.618 d
- Inclination
- unknown, small
- Satellite of
- Saturn
- Mean radius
- ~2 km
- Synodic rotation period
- probably synchronous
- Axial tilt
- unknown
- Albedo
- unknown
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- moon of Saturn
- Parent body
- Saturn
Show 2 more facts
- time of discovery or invention
- 2004-06-21
- semi-major axis of an orbit
- 140100
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~3 min read
Encyclopedic overview
S/2004 S 4 is the provisional designation of an unconfirmed object seen orbiting Saturn within the inner strand of the F ring on June 21, 2004. It was spotted while J. N. Spitale was trying to confirm the orbit of another provisional object, S/2004 S 3, that was seen 5 hours earlier just exterior to the F ring. The announcement was made on September 9, 2004.
Despite later attempts to recover it, it has not been reliably sighted since. Notably, an imaging sequence covering an entire orbital period at 4 km resolution taken on November 15, 2004, failed to recover the object. The sequence should have been easily capable of detecting a moon of similar size, suggesting it to simply be a transient clump. An approximate linkage could be made of S/2004 S 3 to S/2004 S 4, and matched to two other detected clumps on other dates, but considering its non-detection in November, their relation is probably coincidental.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “S/2004 S 4” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.