Tech Shout!

US scientists have claimed that they have made a significant move forward in understanding the dynamics of Saturn’s beautiful yet mysterious rings.

In particular, the behavior of one of Saturn’s rings called the ‘G’ ring, has boggled experts for ages now.

Now, data transmitted by the Cassini space probe suggests that Saturn’s ‘G’ ring is most likely to be produced by relatively large and icy particles that reside within a bright arc on the ring’s inner edge.

In case you are clueless, the ‘G’ ring is one of Saturn’s outermost rings and is located more than 1,68,000km from the center of the planet.

According to Matthew Hedman, a research associate at Cornell University , “It’s a dusty ring. Like the ‘E’ ring and ‘F’ ring, it is primarily composed of tiny grains of ice just a few microns across.”

The plasma in the giant planet’s magnetic field sweeps through the arc continually, dragging out the fine particles, which create the G ring, added Hedman.

However, these minute specks can easily be dispersed or eroded as they whiz around Saturn. For the rings to remain in place, they either need something to serve them with a constant supply of new dust and ice, or for a large object such as a moon to confine the particles in the band through its gravitational interactions.

According to the study, the moon Enceladus directly supplies new material to the nearby ‘E’ ring while in the case of the ‘F’ ring, satellites Promethus and Pandora may help to keep the particles within this narrow region.

“But the ‘G’ ring is not near a moon, and that’s the thing that makes it odd,” added Hedman.

The finding, he added, is evidence of the complex interaction between Saturn’s moons, rings and magnetosphere. Studying that interaction is one of Cassini’s objectives.

A while ago, we had also reported that the Cassini spacecraft discovered one more of the planet’s moons, now amounting to a grand total of 60!