LOS ANGELES, March 30 (Xinhua) — The vast ring system of giant planet Saturn is heating its upper atmosphere, according to the latest NASA discovery Thursday.
NASA reported that this phenomenon had not been seen before in the solar system.
It used data collected over 40 years by several NASA missions, including those collected by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, the retired Cassini probe, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, as well as data collected in The task of the retired international ultraviolet detector, to make this discovery.
In the same context, NASA stated that the most appropriate explanation for this phenomenon is that the particles of ice rings that rain on the atmosphere of Saturn cause it to heat up, indicating that this is likely to be caused by the impact of micrometeorites, or the bombing of Saturn. Solar wind particles, solar ultraviolet radiation, or electromagnetic forces pick up electrically charged dust.
The research was published Thursday in the journal Planetary Science.
In light of this, said Lotfi Ben Javel of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, “We are still at the beginning of the influence of the characteristics of the rings on the upper atmosphere of the planet. We want at the end to have a global approach that gives a real effect about the atmosphere in distant worlds.
“One of the goals of this study is to see how this can be achieved on planets around other stars. You could call it the search for ‘outer rings’,” he added.