[ad_1]
(CNN) – Earth is not the only planet that experiences a change of seasons. The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the colorful transition from summer to fall in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, a change that has been brewing for years.
Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest in our solar system, takes about 29 Earth years to complete one orbit around our star. That means each season of the ringed gas giant lasts more than seven Earth years.
Astronomers have tracked summer on Saturn for the past few years, capturing images of the planet’s northern hemisphere in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Along the way, they have seen changes within Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere in the polar regions and around the equator.
“These small year-to-year changes in Saturn’s color bands are fascinating,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
“What we found was a slight year-to-year change in color, possibly in the height of the clouds and winds, not surprisingly the changes are not huge as we are only seeing a small fraction of a Saturn year. . We expect big changes on a seasonal timescale, so this shows the progression into the next season. “
Simon is the lead author of a study published March 11 in the Planetary Science Journal that describes these changes on Saturn.
From 2018 to 2020, Saturn’s equator brightened by 5-10%, while winds near the equator actually decreased from 1,000 miles per hour to about 800 miles per hour.
Seasonal changes occur on Earth due to the way our planet is tilted relative to the sun, so different hemispheres of the planet receive varying amounts of sunlight as we orbit the star. Saturn is also tilted, which means that its seasonal changes and those atmospheric variations could be driven by changes in sunlight.
Saturn, which is nine times the width of our planet, is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium and is speckled with ammonia, methane, and water vapor that create its yellow color. Scientists suspect that the gas giant’s core is rocky. Like Jupiter, storms as large as our entire planet can appear deep in Saturn’s atmosphere.
Last year, Hubble’s crystalline view of Saturn showed traces of small storms that occurred within the planet’s atmosphere.
These observations of changes to Saturn were made during Hubble’s Legacy of Outer Planets Atmospheres program, known as OPAL. Scientists use this program to observe the outer planets of our solar system each year and observe how they change over time.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Hubble spies the colorful changing of seasons on Saturn.”
[ad_2]
