GREENBELT, Maryland – There has been a lot of exciting space news recently. The Pentagon is talking about the existence of “vehicles out of the world”. NASA discovered a solar system like ours. And Comet NEOWISE is lighting up the night sky. If all of that isn’t exciting enough, NASA officials are now giving the world an amazing glimpse of the sixth planet, Saturn.
Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, Saturn’s ice rings are brilliantly visible in the July 4 image. Different bands of color can be seen on the planet’s surface. The Hubble photo also captures two of Saturn’s 82 moons. Mimas is seen on the right and Enceladus is in the background more than 800 million miles away.
Summer time on Saturn
The NASA team in Maryland says that it is currently summer in the planet’s northern hemisphere. Some scientists believe that this is the cause of the slight red haze covering Saturn. The additional heat may be causing increased exposure to sunlight to remove icy aerosols from the atmosphere.
It could also be changing the amounts of photochemical turbidity produced. At the south pole Saturn appears to have a blue haze, probably because it’s winter down there.
“It is surprising that even in a few years, we are seeing seasonal changes on Saturn,” says lead investigator Amy Simon of the Goddard Space Flight Center in a press release.
What are those iconic rings made of?
The authors of the new report also make new observations about Saturn’s famous rings. They believe that the rings are mostly pieces of ice ranging in size from small grains to large rocks. NASA says it’s unclear how and when Saturn’s rings were formed, but that doesn’t stop scientists from offering many different opinions on it.
Some astronomers believe that the formation of rings dates back to when the planet was born more than four billion years ago. Others speculate that the rings are younger since they are so shiny. Opponents of this theory do not see how vibrating rings could form in the last few hundred million years.
“Measurements by 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 ring system,” says Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley. .
Hubble has been in space since 1990. The telescope’s namesake Edwin Hubble gained fame in the 1920s for discovering galaxies beyond the Milky Way at his observatory in California.
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