SATURN’S RINGS ARE ACTING STRANGE
New images of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope herald the start of the planet’s “spoke season.”
Whenever Saturn has its autumnal or vernal equinox, strange spokes appear across the planet’s rings.
However, their cause and seasonal nature are still unclear.
Scientists suspect the cause is the planet’s magnetic field.
The solar wind sends charged particles into planets’ magnetic fields…
…On Earth this causes the northern and southern lights.
Icy ring particles can become charged, temporarily levitating them above the rest of the ring.
At its autumnal equinox (May 2025), the spokes should become more prominent.
Saturn’s tilted axis gives it four seasons like Earth, but each lasts about seven Earth years due to its larger orbit.
Saturn’s last equinox was in 2009, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured these images.
Hubble continued monitoring Saturn after Cassini’s mission ended in 2017.
Hubble supplies visual and spectroscopic data in ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths.
This data will form a fuller picture of the spoke phenomenon, revealing intricacies of ring physics.
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