STRANGE LINES APPEAR IN SATURN'S RINGS
"IT'S A FASCINATING MAGIC TRICK OF NATURE WE ONLY SEE ON SATURN — FOR NOW AT LEAST."
Acting Up
There's something strange going on with Saturn's beautiful rings.
The gas giant experiences four seasons, much like our own except seven Earth years in length, thanks to its tilted axis. During the planet's equinox, when its rings tilt edge-on to the Sun, mysterious and fleeting new features appear in its rings called "spokes."
As NASA explains, astronomers have started referring to this period as "spoke season," something that has been observed since the early 1980s thanks to NASA's Voyager mission.
Now, the agency's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of these strange lines crossing Saturn's rings, heralding the start of the planet's most puzzling transitional period.
Spo(o)ke(y) Season
We still don't know why these mysterious spokes appear, let alone why they're seasonal in nature.
More:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/lines-saturn-rings
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By Georgina Torbet
February 11, 2023 12:49PM
Saturn is famous for its beautiful rings, but these rings have a strange feature: “spokes” which appear intermittently. These spots in the rings can be light or dark and can look like blobs or like lines stretching radially outward from the planet, and they appear in a regular cycle related to the planet’s equinox. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has the opportunity to study these oddities of the rings in more detail and researchers hope they can learn more about what causes these features.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observation time devoted to Saturn each year, thanks to the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, and the dynamic gas giant planet always shows us something new. This latest image heralds the start of Saturn’s “spoke season” with the appearance of two smudgy spokes in the B ring, on the left in the image. SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
The spokes were first noticed by the Cassini mission to Saturn in the 1980s, and since then they have been seen just before and after the equinox: the time at which day and night are of equal length across the planet because the sun is directly over the equator. On Earth, we experience two equinoxes each year, and the same is true for Saturn — but because Saturn is further out in its orbit and its year is much longer, its equinoxes occur just once every 15 Earth years.
Saturn’s next autumnal equinox is coming up on May 2025, so researchers are using Hubble to observe the planet and its rings at this key time. “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,” said Amy Simon, head of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, in a statement.
That’s good news because although the researchers know they’ll see spokes around this time, they don’t know exactly when they will start appearing.
“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,” Simon explained.
More:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/saturn-rings-spokes/