Ethereal, stately Saturn, it turns out, deals with a problem we Earthlings are quite familiar with this time of year: rain. The planet gets an Olympic-pool sized quantity of water dumped on her each day.
Studying satellite images taken at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, James O’Donoghue, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues noticed several mysterious dark bands on the surface of Saturn. They found that the bands correlate directly to magnetic lines that link the planet with her densest, wateriest, and most brilliant, rings, and shared these cosmic findings in a letter to Nature last week. The drizzle coming from her rings effectively douses the glowing hydrogen molecules we see on Saturn's surface.
Saturn is famous, among humans, for her very photographic rings. But their origins, and evolution, have remained a mystery. How exactly were the rings formed to begin with? Are the rings ...
