what the hell..?

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

DM> how on earth did root-servers.com get in auth list?

It didn't.  "[a-m].root-servers.net." did.  The content DNS server 
doesn't know anything about "saturncorp.com.", or even anything about 
"com.".  So it has returned a partial answer ending in a referral to the 
nearest enclosing superdomain that it _does_ know about: ".".

I suspect that you are confused as to the meaning of "authority section".