Saturn tagged posts

Light curve of OGLE-2013-BLG-0132. The inset shows the enlargement of the caustic crossing parts of the light curve. The lower panel shows the residuals from the best-fit model. Credit: Mróz et al., 2017.

An international team has detected 2 new giant alien worlds circling distant stars. The newly found planets are estimated to be as massive as Saturn and are orbiting M dwarfs beyond the snow line. The planets were discovered by researchers working as part of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) group and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) collaboration. OGLE uses the 1.3-m Warsaw Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, while MOA utilizes the 1.8-m MOA-II telescope at the Mount John University Observatory, located in New Zealand...

This collage of images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn’s northern hemisphere and rings as viewed with four different spectral filters. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Scenes include Saturn’s hexagon-shaped jet stream. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has sent to Earth its first views of Saturn’s atmosphere since beginning the latest phase of its mission. The new images show scenes from high above Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Cassini began its new mission phase, called its Ring-Grazing Orbits, on Nov. 30. Each of these weeklong orbits – 20 in all – carries the spacecraft high above Saturn’s northern hemisphere before sending it skimming past the outer edges of the planet’s main rings.

Cassini’s imaging cameras acquired these latest views on Dec...

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2015. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 28,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science

Their contrasts are related, in large part, to their sizes. Tethys (660 miles across) is large enough to be spherical and to have varied geology, like chasms and smooth plains, along with some puzzling arc-shaped features (see PIA19637 http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19637) ...

A false-color composite image, constructed from data obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft showing the glow the aurora about 1,000 km above the cloud tops of Saturn’s south pole (credit NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/ University of Leicester)

The evidence that Saturn’s upper atmosphere may, when buffeted by the solar wind, emit the same total amount of mass per second into its magnetosphere as its moon, Enceladus, has been found by UCL scientists working on the Cassini mission. Magnetospheres are regions of space that are heavily influenced by the magnetic field of a nearby planet and can contain charged particles in the form of plasma from both external and internal sources.

In the case of Saturn, its moon Enceladus ejects water from its icy plumes which is ionised into H2O+, O+, OH+ ...