• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Saturn’s Rings Get “Spokes” As Equinox Approaches

February 10, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

NASA’s Voyager mission in the 1980s discovered that the rings of Saturn get temporary “spokes”, smudgy areas within the rings that are either darker or lighter than the surrounding material. The spokes happen only during a certain period, the years right before and after an equinox. The autumnal equinox for Saturn’s northern hemisphere is coming on May 6, 2025, and now the first spokes have appeared.

The last equinox of Saturn was in 2009. At the time, the ringed planet was orbited by the Cassini spacecraft. The mission was a collaborative work between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency and revolutionized humanity’s understanding of Saturn. But the mechanism behind these spokes managed to elude even such a successful mission.  

Advertisement

“Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season,” NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon, head of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, said in a statement.

An animated show reel of three observations of Saturn in different years. Its inclination changes

Hubble Space Telescope images of Saturn taken in 2018, 2019, and 2020 during the planet’s northern hemisphere summer. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/A. Simon/R. Roth

 The team believes that the culprit is Saturn’s variable magnetic field. The charged particles released from the Sun as the solar wind interact constantly with planetary magnetic fields. But as a planet orbits the Sun, the relative positions of magnetic fields and solar wind change. It is possible that around the equinoxes, the environment around Saturn becomes electrically charged in a certain way. This would lead to the smallest particles in the icy rings becoming electrically charged and levitating above the larger particles and boulders in the rings.

Depending on the illumination and viewing angles, the features might appear darker or lighter than the surrounding rings. It is unknown if this effect also happens at the rings of the other giant planets, which are much less prominent than Saturn’s spectacular system. Saturn’s rings and the other planets will be monitored as part of OPAL. The team hopes to uncover more clues to explain exactly what causes the spokes, and reveal what they truly are.

“Thanks to Hubble’s OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before,” Simon said.

Advertisement

Another famous seasonal change on Saturn is the color-changing hexagonal storm in the polar region, which goes from blueish to gold and back to blue depending on the amount of sunlight received. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Skype alumni head to court in a battle over Starship Technologies and Wire
  2. GM auto sales fall for first time in four quarters
  3. Do Flying Fish Really Fly?
  4. 4-Day Work Week Trial A Huge Success With 86% Of Companies Keeping It

Source Link: Saturn’s Rings Get “Spokes” As Equinox Approaches

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • 300,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools “Made By Denisovans” Discovered In China
  • Why Do Cats Eyes Glow? For The Same Reason Great White Sharks’ Do, Silly
  • G-astronomical News: Michelin-Starred Meal To Be Served On The ISS
  • In 2032, Earth May Witness A Once-In-5,000-Year Event On The Moon
  • Brand New Microscope Designed For Underwater Reveals Stunning Details Of Corals
  • The Atlantic’s Major Circulation Current Is Showing Worrying Signs, But Is Collapse Near?
  • “The Rings Held The Answer”: How We Finally Figured Out Saturn’s Day Length In 2019
  • Mystery Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” Solved By A Dentist And A Protractor
  • Asteroid Ryugu’s Latest Mineral Is As Weird As Finding “A Tropical Seed In The Arctic”
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We Living Through A Sixth Mass Extinction?
  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away
  • NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Recorded Evidence Of Electrified Dust Devils On Mars
  • “Hymn to Babylon”: Missing Mesopotamian Text Dating Back Nearly 3,000 Years Discovered
  • Multiple New Species Of Cute Spotty And Stripy Geckos Discovered In Remote Cambodia
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version