The rings of Saturn are perfectly visible in NASA's latest Hubble Space Telescope



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Image of the Saturn Hubble Space Telescope
NASA, ESA, Simon A. (GSFC), Mr. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) shared the latest Saturn photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – and the rings of the planet are fully exposed.

The photo is one of the clearest images ever taken of Saturn, because the Hubble can take high-resolution images of other planets in our solar system better than almost anything except a spaceship that visits the planet, NASA said. ESA in a statement. announcement of sharing the photo published Thursday.

"Saturn's signature rings are still breathtaking," NASA wrote. "The image shows that the ring system is tilted toward the Earth, offering viewers a magnificent look at the glossy, glossy structure."

Although we have learned a lot about the gas giant's rings in recent decades, including the fact that they are made up of ice and dust orbiting the planet, the fact remains that many mysteries remain. Astronomers still do not hear about the age of the rings and do not know what caused them either.

Hubble's new images show that Saturn has a "turbulent and dynamic atmosphere," writes NASA, including many violent storms that are rapidly fading. A major storm visible on an image taken by Hubble last year has since disappeared in the new images.

"Small storms appear like popcorn popping in a microwave oven before disappearing as quickly," NASA wrote. "Even the band structure of the planet reveals subtle color changes."

A gaseous pattern on the planet has remained: a six-sided pattern on the north pole of Saturn, which astronomers have dubbed the hexagon is still there. This pattern, identified in 1981 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is caused by a jet stream at high speed.

NASA and ESA also released a short video, taken in June, showing Saturn's many icy moons orbiting the planet for more than 18 hours. The moons – Tethys, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus and Rhea – each have a different orbit. The closer a moon is to the planet, the faster it turns.

Saturn's latest photos are part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy Project (OPAL), a collaboration designed to help scientists better understand the atmospheric dynamics of all the planets in our solar system. In the future, scientists will monitor the weather conditions of Saturn to determine if they can identify trends.

The Hubble has been very successful recently. On Wednesday, NASA said that it had been used to discover an Earth-like exoplanet, called K2-18b. The so-called "Super-Earth" is about 110 light-years away and contains water vapor in the atmosphere, which means that it could sustain life. In August, Hubble captured beautiful images of a "cosmic jellyfish" – the NGC 2022 planetary nebula located in the constellation Orion.

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