(ORDO NEWS) — Saturn’s axial tilt is 26.73 degrees, which is why it, like the Earth, has four seasons, although due to the gas giant’s much greater distance from the Sun, one season lasts about seven years.
At the time of the equinox, when the ring system of Saturn leans edgewise towards the Sun, mysterious and fleeting changes appear in it, called “spokes”.
As NASA explains , astronomers call this moment “the season of the spokes,” and scientists have known about its existence since the early 1980s thanks to NASA’s Voyager space program.
Now NASA/ESA‘s Hubble Space Telescope has captured detailed images of the spokes, capturing strange lines that cross Saturn’s rings, heralding the start of the planet’s most mysterious transition.
Spoke season on Saturn
We still don’t know why these spokes appear, let alone why they are strictly seasonal.
“Despite years of unprecedented Cassini [NASA mission] observations, the exact start and length of the spoke season is still unpredictable,” said Amy Simon, senior planetary scientist at NASA.
But scientists have a dominant theory: the spokes could be the result of changes in Saturn’s magnetic fields caused by the solar wind.
This electromagnetic phenomenon, which causes the aurora on Earth, could cause ice particles in Saturn’s smallest rings to float above the rest of the rings, causing them to appear as fleeting shadows in Hubble’s observations.
Astronomers are now combining Hubble data with Cassini observations to better understand the mysterious phenomenon.
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