Curiosities of Saturn

A couple of interesting articles from New Scientist magazine this week discuss physics on Saturn and one of its moons, both relating to discoveries made by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

One thing that Cassini found is that Saturn's atmosphere is much more tempestuous than was previously believed. The light and dark patches (visible in the infrared image to the right) are still being explored, but at least one researcher, Kevin Baines of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks it may be the result of updrafts and downdrafts in the planet's atmosphere, causing some sort of cloud formation. In this infrared image, the clouds are the dark patches and the light patches are gaps in the clouds. According to Baines, Saturn "is not a boring planet anymore."

Meanwhile, Saturn's icy moon Enceladus exhibits plumes of water vapor. Originally discovered by Cassini in June 2005, scientists had believed that the warm region surrounding these vapor plumes was a result of gravitational effects. Now, in a new article, scientists are suggesting that some or all of it may come from chemical reactions triggered by cosmic rays - charged particles that are generated by the sun and other stars.

Related Articles

• About Space Blog - NASA Finds Saturn's Moons May Be Creating New Rings
• New Scientist - Bizarre "string of pearls" adorns Saturn
• New Scientist - Cosmic rays could power icy moon's plumes
• Physics Experiment - Cosmic Ray Detector
• NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Mission to Saturn & Titan