Radio signals from two NASA probes, Cassini at Saturn and Juno at Jupiter, have allowed scientists to penetrate the swirling clouds of these gas giants. These are hidden deep inside the planets and are meant to help them get to know them better.
So it is located exactly where the crushing pressure changes matter into states unknown to us on Earth. Thanks to this, scientists came to the realization that both planets are much more complex than they actually thought up to that time. He stated that Ravit Helleda planetary scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
“Giant planets are not just simple spheres filled with hydrogen and helium.”
Radio signals have baffled scientists
Scientists have thus managed to turn radio signals into probes full of gravitational changes. These are created deep inside the gas giants, which are not only Saturn, but also Jupiter.
He dealt with this issue in the eighties of the last century Luciana Less from the Sapienza University of Rome. He participated in the pioneering development of the radio instrument for the Cassini probe. The goal was to get a clean signal in the Ka band. A place relatively free of interplanetary plasma noise.
By monitoring the radio signal fluctuations, the team planned to search for gravitational waves from space and test the general theory of relativity during the probe’s journey to Saturn, which began in 1997, and also from a similar device on the Juno mission to Jupiter, which launched in 2011.
Less and his colleagues used the radio fluctuations to map the shape of the gravitational fields on both planets, allowing them to infer the density and motions of material deep inside.
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One of the goals was to “probe the roots of the strong winds” that whip the clouds of these gas giants into distinctive horizontal bands. Scientists assumed that the winds would be either shallow, like the winds on Earth, or very deep, penetrating tens of thousands of kilometers into the interior of the planet. There, the extreme pressure is expected to strip electrons from the hydrogen, turning it into a metal-like conductor.
However, the obtained radio signals confused the scientists. The picture of Saturn is becoming more and more unclear. Data from the Cassini probe suggests that its core could have a mass of about 15 to 18 times that of Earth and a higher concentration of heavy elements than Jupiter, which could indicate a clearer boundary.
According to David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of the Juno project, this interpretation is uncertain. Additionally, Cassini was being dragged by something deep inside Saturn that could not be explained by winds. It is a kind of dark side of Saturn’s gravity.
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The most likely explanation for this additional gravity is normal modes, such as Saturn’s oscillations. So these are essentially long wavelength sound waves, not unlike those we see in the Sun or on Earth.
Scientists still have no idea what exactly causes this phenomenon. However, they suspect that these longitudinal changes in the gravity field are caused by deep storms or some kind of internal convection.
These are similar variations that were recently detected on Jupiter due to the Great Red Spot.
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