![]() Stallard applied for time at the Keck Observatory, a pair of 300-ton telescopes sitting atop the 13,800-foot-high peak of Hawai‘i’s Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano. The fated-to-die probe, they thought, could provide those contemporaneous atmospheric observations on the final arc of its journey. Stallard and his colleagues reasoned that if Saturn’s multiple radio lighthouses could be explained by something weird happening in the upper atmosphere, they would need to pick a radio lighthouse, track its behavior, and then compare that with matching observations of its atmosphere, hoping to see a sign that the two were interlocked in a strange dance. During the probe’s final months, there was a very narrow window of opportunity. When it burned up in the Saturnian skies on September 15, 2017, the last great hope of cracking the case appeared poised to vanish with it.Įxcept-hope wasn’t entirely lost. In the summer of 2017, with its rocket propellant almost entirely spent, Cassini was ordered to plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere so as not to risk crashing into and contaminating one of its potentially life-harboring moons. That year, scientists decoded these undulations, revealing, finally, the length of a day on Saturn: 10 hours, 33 minutes, and 38 seconds.īut the mystery of the origins of Saturn’s many radio lighthouses remained frustratingly unsolved. This tugs at the icy particles within Saturn’s rings, creating fine ripples and waves. Whenever the planet’s concealed innards twitch, convulse, and rotate, the planet’s gravity field shifts. But in 2019, planetary scientists had an epiphany while examining another of the gas giant’s features: its rings. Resolving this riddle seemed necessary if scientists wanted to determine the length of a Saturnian day. “To my knowledge, first time an aurora driven by atmospheric winds has been detected,” says Rosie Johnson, a space physics researcher at Aberystwyth University in Wales who is not involved with the study. But some of its auroras only make an appearance when screaming winds shoot across the north pole-a bit like a gust of air stirring up a cosmic bonfire. Like Earth’s, Saturn’s northern lights are fueled by a shower of energized particles from the heavens. Now, as revealed by a recent study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists have discovered an aurora on that ringed world that is unlike any other. They exist on other worlds with magnetic fields, including Saturn, whose auroral glow shimmers in the infrared and ultraviolet. But Earth doesn’t hold a monopoly on auroras. Earth’s northern and southern lights-the result of a rendezvous between magnetic fields, energized particles from the Sun, and our planet’s atmospheric admixture-are wondrous spectacles.
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