Space

Cassini Confirms 25 Year Old Prediction

Electric plasma ring around Saturn

By Gabriel Gache, Science News Editor

13th of December 2007, 13:44 GMT

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Artistic impression of the ring of electric plasma around Saturn

It seems that the spacecraft Cassini-Huygens has been rather busy lately, as scientists are now flooding us with new information regarding planet Saturn. The spacecraft, designed in a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, is currently being operated by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and has recently discovered that Saturn presents a doughnut shape around it, which consists of an electric field of plasma.

A similar feature has been observed around Earth as well; however, it seems that our planet's electric phenomena is weaker,

and does not rotate as that observed around Saturn. The plasma field observed around the gas giant extends more than one million miles above the planet's atmosphere.

Astrophysicist Don Mitchell, from the John Hopkins University, explains that the electric field of plasma observed, is mostly generated by the emission of the moon Enceladus, during extensive geological activity. Enceladus contains high amounts of ice water on its surface, which sublimates as the geological activity intensifies in a certain area of the moon. As a result, the water vapor creates large stream of jets that are released into its thin atmosphere, and ejected into space, where the water suffers a similar process to that of electrolysis, in which oxygen and hydrogen is separated and turned into energized plasma.

Unlike Saturn, Earth's ring current is situated rather close in the upper atmosphere and consists mostly of solar wind particles and hydrogen.

As the hydrogen and oxygen gas is turned into plasma, the solar wind interacts with it, ripping half of the plasma ring into two separate ribbons of plasma that extend into space, in the opposite direction of the Sun.

Although it seems that the ring of current appears to be stationary around our planet, the truth is that it rotates so slow that is extremely difficult to observe it. On the other hand, Saturn's electric plasma spins around the planet about two times faster than the speed of that around the Earth, in a trigonometric direction.

This doughnut shaped ring of electric plasma was predicted to had existed more than 25 years ago; however, while the space probe Cassini-Huygens proved it existed, measurements also indicate some irregularities in its consistence, suggesting unusual activity in a certain region of the planet.

TAGS:

electrified plasma | Enceladus | Saturn | Earth | electric current

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