Tagged: saturn

Gear up for Saturn’s annual show in the night sky! Starting Monday (Aug. 2), you can find Saturn shining in the sky as part of a celestial phenomenon called opposition. Earth and the ringed planet will be on the same side of the sun and...

When viewed through a telescope, Saturn is our solar system’s most glorious planet. But, to the eye, Saturn isn’t as noticeable as bright Jupiter. Luckily, we’re still less than a year past the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. It happened on December 21, 2020....

An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the hidden ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy by scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences & Lettres University. Giant water plumes erupting...

Saturn’s year, or 1 trip in its orbit around the sun, is equal to nearly 30 Earth-years. The tilt of Saturn’s axis is 26.7 degrees, fairly close to Earth’s 23.5 degrees. So Saturn has four seasons just as Earth does … although Saturn’s seasons each...

New Johns Hopkins University simulations offer an intriguing look into Saturn’s interior, suggesting that a thick layer of helium rain influences the planet’s magnetic field. The models, published this week in AGU Advances, also indicate that Saturn’s interior may feature higher temperatures at the equatorial...

Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, probably helped to cause the ringed planet to start tipping off-kilter long ago. Saturn is tilted with respect to its orbit around the Sun, by a little bit more than Earth is. Planetary scientists had thought that Saturn acquired its tilt...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers a view of changes in Saturn’s vast and turbulent atmosphere as the planet’s northern hemisphere summer transitions to fall as shown in this series of images taken in 2018, 2019, and 2020 (left to right). “These small year-to-year...

Enceladus, Saturn’s mysterious moon that could support life, could be more geologically active than previously thought, according to a new study. The research, published in the scientific journal Icarus, looked at new images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and found the northern hemisphere of Enceladus has...

Just five weeks after beaming home images of a giant space ravioli, NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft has shown us a “UFO.” Well, sort of. On Tuesday (April 12), Cassini snapped the best-ever photos of Saturn’s bizarre moon Atlas, whose humped middle and broad equatorial ridge...

Saturn and Jupiter will appear to almost kiss this winter solstice, although not because of some cosmic mistletoe hanging overhead. Rather, the two gas giants will look as though they’re very close in the night sky in an event known as a “great conjunction,” which...