(ORDO NEWS) — Saturn’s atmosphere around its equator radiates slightly above average. This means that it is additionally heated, most likely under the influence of a constant stream of particles falling from the rings.
The grandiose rings of Saturn are far from static. It is a dynamic system in which something is constantly happening.
The rings are replenished with new particles from nearby satellites and lose them, dropping them onto a massive planet.
Such processes have been known for many years, but the new work has shown one aspect that has so far eluded scientists.
It turned out that the fall of particles from the rings into the atmosphere of Saturn causes heating of its upper layers.
Lotfi Ben-Jaffel and colleagues used archival data from ground-based telescopes and space missions that have explored the Saturn system, including the Voyager and Cassini probes.
All of them used different tools, the data of which cannot be directly compared with each other.
Therefore, for calibration, scientists conducted new observations of Saturn using the Hubble telescope, which made it possible to bring together all the archival spectra.
In the ultraviolet region, the authors noticed additional radiation, which was previously considered to be only random noise.
Its spectrum pointed to an increased energy state of atomic hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, associated with its heating.
The signal source is located in the low latitudes of the planet, directly under the ring system. All this suggests that the flow of ice particles falling from them into the atmosphere of Saturn causes it to heat up.
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