The veteran Hubble Space Telescope continues to give us discoveries, the latest being that it has found rings on Saturn that are heating up the planet's upper atmosphere.
In a never-before-seen phenomenon, it involves an unexpected interaction between Saturn and its rings that could potentially provide a tool for predicting whether planets around other stars, exoplanets, also have glorious Saturn-like ring systems.
The image that has been published shows us Saturn in blue, of course this is not the color that we would see with our eyes, it is a vision using filters to capture the Lyman-alpha emission, which is a spectral line of hydrogen that indicates different temperatures.
Saturn is a gaseous planet composed mainly of hydrogen, but how is it possible that the Rings are heating Saturn's atmosphere, the image reveals that there is a spectral line of hot hydrogen in Saturn's atmosphere, the increase in radiation means that something is polluting and heating the upper atmosphere from outside.
The explanation is that the icy particles of the ring rain down on Saturn's atmosphere and when they fall they are the ones that cause this heating, to this we can add the impact of micrometorites, the bombardment of particles from the solar wind, solar ultraviolet radiation or electromagnetic forces that they collect electrically charged dust, all this happens under the influence of Saturn's gravitational field that attracts particles towards the planet, but the rings are the main responsible for the heating. Because we also have another additional proof.
When NASA's Cassini probe plunged into Saturn's atmosphere only to self-destruct at the end of its mission in 2017, one of the last things it did was measure the planet's atmospheric components and confirmed that many particles were falling from the rings, because something that you may not know is that the beautiful image of Saturn with its rings is only temporary, something that humans have been lucky enough to see.
They were formed towards the end of The Age of Dinosaurs, since they are not more than 100 million years old, perhaps they are much younger, due to the collision of two small icy moons or perhaps the destruction of a moon by the impact of a large asteroid. , the Rings are disintegrating and will end up completely disappearing in about 300 million years at most.
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