Starry Skies Network

A NEW form of matter surrounds Saturn – a plasma put there by Enceladus, the planet’s tiny moon.
“It’s a type of charged particle that has never been observed before,” says Tom Hill of Rice University in Houston, Texas.

An enormous lake on Saturn’s moon Titan apparently behaves like mudflats on our planet, draining and refilling over time, according to a new study.

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most scientifically interesting spots in the solar system. The second-largest moon after Jupiter’s Gannymede and bigger than the planet Mercury, it’s shrouded beneath a thick, smoggy atmosphere rich in methane creating a greenhouse effect and constantly unloads complex hydrocarbons that rain down on the surface.

A huge ocean of liquid water may indeed slosh about beneath the frigid surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, according to new evidence collected by a NASA spacecraft.

So you think this week’s East Coast snowstorm is a biggie? Get a load of the monster storm system that astronomers are seeing on Saturn. Some astronomers have suggested that this is shaping up as a “Great White Spot” — a rare occurrence on the ringed planet — and now the Cassini orbiter has gotten its first good look at the phenomenon.

Astrophysicist Robin Canup loves to smash things together.
At last week’s American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Science meeting in Pasadena, California, she proposed that Saturn’s magnificent ring system is the result of a moon at least the size of the planet Mercury that plunged into the gas giant.

A fizzy, interior ocean similar to Perrier may feed jets spraying from the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Bubbles in seawater travel through a passage in the icy crust to feed a geyser, as shown in the illustration above. The expelled seawater then flows back down to the subsurface ocean through cracks in the ice.

Saturn’s rings may have formed when a large moon with an icy mantle and rocky core spiralled into the nascent planet.
A US scientist has suggested that the tidal forces ripped off some of the moon’s mantle before the actual impact.

The northern hemisphere of Saturn’s moon Titan is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year.

A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (via the American Geophysical Union) reports on a startling new finding that Saturn’s auroras might be related to another mystery surrounding the planet: that of pulsed radio emissions first detected when the Voyager satellite missions flew past in 1980 and 1981.