Without a doubt, Saturn is one of the most amazing planets from our Solar System. It has its iconic rings, the most moons (82), and it’s an object made almost entirely of gases. Saturn is also the second biggest planet after Jupiter, and it features a 95 times bigger mass than the one Earth has.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just took a new snapshot at Saturn on the Independence Day (July 4), and it captured the planet’s summertime in the northern hemisphere. What the telescope found are actually small atmospheric storms.
Reddish haze above the northern hemisphere triggers curiosity
The reddish haze identified over the northern hemisphere sparks some mystery among astronomers. Some of them believe that the phenomenon happened due to heating from increased sunlight. That could either change the atmospheric circulation or remove ices from aerosols present in the atmosphere. Another possibility is that the increased sunlight in the summer months could be changing the amounts of haze produced.
As for the unmistakable rings of Saturn, Michael Wong, who is team member of the University of California, Berkeley, has something to say:
However, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft measurements of tiny grains raining into Saturn’s atmosphere suggest the rings can only last for 300 million more years, which is one of the arguments for a young age of the ring system,
Two of the numerous moons of Saturn are clearly visible in the new image: Mimas and Enceladus.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been the culprit for many amazing cosmic insights gathered, and they include black holes, galaxies, stars, and so on. The telescope was named after the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who way back in the ’20’s had discovered that the Universe is expanding and that they’re many other galaxies besides our own.
However, Hubble will be replaced in 2021 with the James Webb Telescope, an even more advanced cosmic hunter.
