agencies
Saturday, February 11, 2023 08:00 PM
Saturn is tilted on its axis like Earth and therefore has four seasons, although due to Saturn’s much larger orbit, each season lasts about seven Earth years, RT reports.
New images of Saturn, taken from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, herald the beginning of the “spoke season” of the planet during the equinox, when mysterious features appear across its rings, and planetary scientists did not explain the reason for this phenomenon.
The equinox occurs when the rings tend to the edge of the sun, and the radial formations that penetrate the rings for thousands of kilometers disappear when the planet approaches the summer or winter solstice, when the sun appears to reach its highest or lowest latitude in the northern or southern half of the planet.
With the approach of the autumnal equinox of Saturn’s northern hemisphere on May 6, 2025, the phenomenon of “radial bars” is expected to become increasingly prominent and observable, and the suspected culprit is the planet’s changing magnetic field.
Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment on Earth, and when those charged particles collide with the atmosphere, this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis.
Astronomers believe that small, icy dust-sized particles can also become charged, temporarily lifting those particles above the rest of the large icy particles and rocks in the rings.
The “radial bars” phenomenon was first observed by NASA’s Voyager mission in the early 1980s.
These fleeting, fuzzy features can appear dark or light depending on lighting and viewing angles.
“Thanks to the Hubble Exoplanet Heritage Program (OPAL), which is building an archive of data on planets in the outer solar system, we will have more time to study Saturn’s rings this season than any other,” said Dr. Amy Simon, NASA’s chief planetary scientist and OPAL program leader. time ago”.
Saturn’s last equinox occurred in 2009, while NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was orbiting the gas giant for up-close exploration.
With the Cassini mission completed in 2017, and the Voyager spacecraft long gone, Hubble continues its long-term monitoring of changes on Saturn and other outer planets.
“Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the exact onset and exact duration of the bar season remains as unpredictable as the prediction of the first storm during hurricane season,” Simon said. “While the other three gas giant planets in our solar system also contain Ring systems, nothing compares to the prominent rings of Saturn, which makes them a laboratory for the study of talking phenomena.