What Are These Mysterious Dark ‘Spokes’ on Saturn’s Rings? | SmartNews
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A photo of Saturn taken by the Hubble Telescope last October. Small dark marks called ring spokes are visible on the planet’s left side, just inside the widest black band of space between rings.
NASA, ESA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)
A new photo of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures mysterious dark blotches that appear on the planet’s rings. Called “ring spokes,” the circles spot Saturn along with its signature bands of icy debris.
Scientists have known about ring spokes for decades, but they’re still not positive where they come from.
“The leading theory is that the spokes are tied to Saturn’s powerful magnetic field, with some sort of solar interaction with the magnetic field that gives you the spokes,” Amy Simon, a NASA planetary scientist and lead scientist for Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL ) program, says in a statement from NASA.
The agency’s Voyager 2 space probe first imaged Saturn’s ring spokes in 1981, and the Cassini spacecraft also observed the mysterious phenomenon while studying the gas giant between 2004 and 2017.
But Voyager 2 left the solar system roughly five years ago, and NASA deliberately ended Cassini’s mission by crashing the probe into Saturn in