Bits of Saturn’s rings are falling onto the planet and heating it up

Saturn’s rings keep the earth hot. Four decades of observations have shown that particles from the ring rain down into the atmosphere, where they collide with and heat the hydrogen.

Lotfi Ben-Jaffel of the Paris Institute for Astrophysics and his colleagues studied the two Voyager probes that passed Saturn in 1980 and 1981 and the International Ultraviolet Survey, a space telescope that operated from 1978 to 1996. We made this discovery using archival data from the aircraft. , and the Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. However, all these observations were made with different types of instruments and therefore could not be directly compared.

To fix that, Ben Jaffel and his team used the Hubble Space Telescope to make new observations of Saturn. All archival measurements were then adjusted so that the UV brightness matched what Hubble measured, allowing the light spectrum from each spacecraft to be compared to others.

“When everything was aligned, we could clearly see that the spectrum was consistent across all missions,” Ben-Jaffel said in a statement. “It was a real surprise to me. I plotted the various light distribution data together and wow, it turns out they’re the same.”

All measurements showed extra ultraviolet radiation coming from Saturn’s lower latitudes below the rings. We know that the rings are slowly collapsing under the influence of solar radiation, particles, micrometeorites, and electromagnetic fields, and the planet itself seems to be affected by that collapse. When tiny pieces of ice rain down from the rings onto the planet, they heat the upper atmosphere, causing excess ultraviolet brightness.

But researchers have also discovered a mystery. These same low latitudes appear to have inexplicably hot hydrogen. Some of this hydrogen may come from the rings and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, and in addition to chemical reactions and mixing in the atmosphere, despite all the observations over the years, we know nothing about Saturn’s interior. is not well understood. surely.