The organic compounds of the rain rings of Saturn in its atmosphere | Smart News

The fatal fall of the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn revealed that the gas giant's innermost ring projected icy rains of rain and organic molecules into the upper atmosphere of the planet at incredible speed.

Cassini ended a 13-year-old journey to discover Saturn and her moons a little over a year ago, but many scientific discoveries related to this spectacular release are still in the process of revelation. The probe has crossed the gap between the giant planet and its famous rings 22 times, collecting as much data as possible before diving into the atmosphere of the planet and igniting.

For years, researchers have heard of Saturn's "circular rain," or the fact that the circular system around the planet provides water to the upper atmosphere. But in his latest evolutions around Saturn, Cassini's gadgets measured the constant rain of nanoscale particles. Rain is mainly composed of molecular hydrogen, but it also contains a lot of ice water and carbon compounds, such as butane and propane, Elizabeth Howell reports. Searcher.

The volume of material was one of the biggest surprises; Cassini measured 22,000 pounds of material per second at the fall of the rings. Most of the chemical suspension is being purged from the ring closest to Saturn's atmosphere, the D-ring. At the current rate, the ring could be completely depleted in about 100,000 years.

"It turns out that ring rain is no longer a shower ring," says global scientist Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute and lead author of the study in Science. "While [the ion and neutral mass spectrometer] was designed to study the gases, we could measure the particles of the ring, because they hit the spacecraft at such a high speed that they vaporized. The water ice, as well as the newly discovered organic compounds, detach from the rings much faster than previously thought – up to 10,000 kilograms of material per second. "

This discovery changes what we know about the rings of Saturn and its atmosphere. Co-author Kelly Miller, Global Science Specialist at the Southwest Research Institute, entrusted Howell Searcher that the massive amount of ring rain suggests that Saturn D rings are powered by materials from the larger Saturn C rings, a new discovery. The data also suggests that the D-ring contains many materials that are too small to be picked up by remote sensors, which means that a direct sampling, as Cassini did, is the only way to detect it.

In fact, another recent study using Cassini data indicates that the rings of Saturn are only 150 to 300 million years old and may not last forever, especially if they are constantly losing materials to the planet. But not everyone agrees with this interpretation and the age of the alliances remains debatable.

"Are we just lucky enough to be in the period when Saturn has these gorgeous rings?" Sean Hsu from the University of Colorado at Boulder asks Nadia Drake to National Geographic. "It is also fascinating to think that if a massive ring could form recently, it would have implications for other icy moonlets of Saturn."

All this dust that enters the upper atmosphere of Saturn also has major effects on the ionosphere, perhaps by heating or modifying the atmosphere.

"This incoming debris disrupts the ionosphere, affects its composition, and has observable effects, which is what we are trying to understand now," says co-author Thomas Cravens of the University of Kansas. A press release. "The data is clear, but the explanations are still being modeled and it will take time."

This The only conclusion of Cassini's grand final published recently. Several other articles based on data also published in Science reveal a new electrical current system connecting the rings and the upper atmosphere and a new radiation belt discovered around the planet. Another study shows that the magnetic field of Saturn is almost aligned on its axis of spin, unlike any other planet studied. Astronomers have also been able to capture radio emissions from the poles of the planet. The Grand Final is expected to reveal even more secrets of Saturn.

"There are still many mysteries as we assemble pieces of the puzzle," says Linda Spilker, Cassini Project Scientist at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The results of the latest Cassini orbits have proved more interesting than we could have imagined."

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