That would be Saturn, the majestic sixth planet of our Solar System, whose rings have fascinated stargazers for centuries. Thanks to NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, in orbit around the gas giant for five years now, it is possible to appreciate those colossal rings in a whole new light.
The magnificent photos that NASA recently released provide the best view yet of Saturn’s rings, which is perhaps best viewed in this slideshow. But it wasn’t just spectacular photography that was reaped from this mission — scientists also picked up new information about the rings, themselves.
That’s because in August, Saturn reached its equinox, which happens twice during its 29.7-year orbit, just as it does during an Earth year. With the rings lit directly edge-on, the images taken by Cassini revealed that they are not as uniformly flat as previously expected; instead, they appear corrugated, like a tin roof.
Furthermore, scientists noted that there are some “bumps” along certain rings that cast long shadows over their neighbors when illuminated by the equatorial sun. If “bumps” is the right word for something that would have to be as tall as the Rocky Mountains, by NASA’s estimates.
“The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings,” Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release on the JPL.gov website. “To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving.”
Added Carolyn Porco, a Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado: “We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we’ve come across walls more than 2 miles [3 kilometers] high. Isn’t that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction.”