Below is a photograph that was originally featured on the fantastic Astronomy Picture of the Day site by NASA . It shows what the Cassini spacecraft saw as it performed a recent "fly-by" of one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus ; giant jets of ice erupting from the surface. As always, click to enlarge.
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The eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan according to researchers at the California Institute of Technology. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles. Liquid hydrocarbon–filled lakes in Titan's northern high latitudes cover 20 times more area than lakes in the southern high latitudes... Read Full Story
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles. A paper describing the theory appears in the November 29th advance online edition of Nature Geoscience. As revealed by... Read Full Story
An aurora, shining high above the northern part of Saturn, moves from the night side to the day side of the planet in this movie recorded by Cassini. These observations, taken over four days, represent the first visible-light video of Saturn's auroras. They show tall auroral curtains, rapidly changing over time when viewed at the limb, or edge, of the planet's northern hemisphere. The sequence of images also reveals that Saturn's auroral curtains, the sheet-like formations of light-emitting... Read Full Story
Saturn's moon Prometheus, orbiting near the streamer-channels it has created in the thin F ring, casts a shadow on the A ring in this image taken a little more than a week after the planet's August 2009 equinox. Potato-shaped Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) periodically creates streamer-channels in the F ring, and the moon's handiwork can be seen on the left of the image. The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun's angle to the ringplane... Read Full Story
NASA's Cassini spacecraft is helping to rewrite our understanding of the shape of our solar system as it moves through the local Milky Way galaxy. Previous models pictured our solar system as having a comet-like appearance. The new results suggest a picture more like a bubble. Cassini scientists created an image from this exotic region of space by detecting particles known as energetic neutral atoms. It complements data collected by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer. When NASA's Cassini... Read Full Story
The Cassini spacecraft observations of Saturn's largest moon, the orange-colored Titan, have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. They now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes.
"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material -- it's a giant
factory of organic chemicals," according to Ralph Lorenz of Johns
Hopkins University Applied... Read Full Story
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will fly by Saturn's moon Enceladus this weekend for a last peek at the intriguing "tiger stripes" before winter darkness blankets the area for several years. Scientists are particularly interested in the tiger stripes, which are fissures in the south polar region, because they spew jets of water vapor and other particles hundreds of kilometers, or miles, from the surface. The flyby, which is sometimes called "E8" because it is the eighth targeted flyby of Enceladus... Read Full Story
A giant, glassy lake larger than North America's Lake Ontario graces the south pole of Saturn's largest moon Titan, according to research from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
Titan, which is one-and-a-half times the size of Earth's moon and
bigger than either Mercury or Pluto, is one of the most intriguing
bodies in the solar system when it comes to exploring environments that
may give rise to life. "This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan... Read Full Story
One may wonder why a coronal has such higher temperature. Picture clearly shows a vague snapped shot of the sun's surface along with relatively thin strips of corona. This rare scene is hardly seen from the Earth. Their temperature is hundreds times higher than the sun. Astronomers have long been searching the main source of the cyclic heat radiation that causes magnetic field within the solar surface. From the close observation via the orbiting satellites, one can see the far ultraviolet... Read Full Story
