“When you see Saturn floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel a cosmic connection, as if you were discovering a mystery in the cosmos,” says Carolyn Porco, who led the science imaging team for the NASA Cassini spacecraft mission. , which at its end The year provided complex details about the workings of Saturn’s complex rings, proving that they may not have been there during the reign of Earth’s dinosaurs, and may be a fairly recent development in our solar system .
Now, a new Hubble image of Saturn shown below was taken on July 4, 2020, during the northern hemisphere summer of the giant ringed planets, when the “opulent giant world” was 839 million miles from the earth. The sharp view of Hubble, reports NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “solves the finely etched concentric ring structure, made up of chunks of ice, ranging in size from small grains to giant rocks, and perhaps solves one of the biggest mysteries of our solar system of how and when rings formed Two of Saturn’s icy moons, Mimas on the right and Enceladus at the bottom. (NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Goddard Space Flight Center, MH Wong, University from California, Berkeley), and the OPAL team)
Conventional wisdom, Goddard reports, “is that they are as old as the planet, more than 4 billion years old. But because the rings are so shiny, like freshly fallen snow, a competitive theory is that they may have formed during the age of dinosaurs. Many astronomers agree that there is no satisfactory theory that explains how the rings could have been formed in the last few hundred million years. “
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“However, measurements from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of small grains raining down into Saturn’s atmosphere suggest that the rings can only last 300 million years longer, which is one of the arguments for an early age of the rings, “said team member Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley.
The Hubble image revealed a series of small atmospheric storms, transient features that seem to come and go with each annual observation. The bands in the northern hemisphere remain pronounced as seen in Hubble’s observations in 2019, with several bands changing slightly in color from year to year. The atmosphere of the ringed planet is mainly hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia, methane, water vapor and hydrocarbons that give it a yellowish brown color.
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Hubble photographed a slight reddish haze over the northern hemisphere in this colored compound. This may be due to warming from increased sunlight, which could change atmospheric circulation or perhaps remove ice from aerosols in the atmosphere. Another theory is that the increase in sunlight in the summer months is changing the amounts of photochemical turbidity produced.
“It is surprising that even in a few years, we are seeing seasonal changes on Saturn,” said lead researcher Amy Simon. In contrast, the now visible South Pole has a blue hue that reflects changes in Saturn’s winter hemisphere.
This image is taken as part of the Legacy of Outer Planet Atmospheres (OPAL) project. OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of gas giant planets in our solar system. In the case of Saturn, astronomers continue to track changing weather patterns and storms.
The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via Goddard Space Flight Center
The image at the top of the page shows Cassini’s before her mission ended in the fiery crash of the spacecraft on Saturn in 2017.
