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Has anyone tried to play it? I'm thinking gigantic turntable…

Absolutely incredible. Did anybody think these were there before this photo?

I do not know. Certainly we (the royal we) understood that so-called ring shepherds cleared the empty paths in the rings (the "gaps") through gravitational interactions. But whether it was suspected that such clearing piled up ring material into giant towers along gap margins, I don't know.

Wait so there's actually a kind of solid part to the rings you could walk around on?

No. I mean, the pieces are solid(ish), but they're not really physically connected to each other. So it would be like trying to walk on a particularly aggressive cloud

This is NASA Photojournal image PIA11668, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 26 July 2009. At the time, the Sun was almost exactly aligned with the rings, enabling Cassini to image the shadows from these icy towers. The towers themselves are hard to see, pointing almost directly up at the camera.

Could you ski down them?

No. They'd fall apart like a shitty Soviet car. Plus you'd accelerate towards the ring plane and start to be shredded by all the little dickhead particles. You'd die in like, four different ways. You would, however, probably get a school named after you.

Wait the rings are *solid*?

"Above" relative to what?