Saturn's Vanishing Rings

Saturn's Vanishing Rings

The planetary jewel of our solar system, Saturn, has bedazzled astronomers for centuries. Named for the Roman god Saturnus, its rings make it one of the most breathtaking sites in the galaxy. However those rings are disappearing, at least, for a little while.

Four hundred years ago, Galileo spotted Saturn and made the first recorded discovery of her rings. He immediately wrote to his patrons saying "I found another very strange wonder, which I should like to make known to their Highnesses…." Unluckily for him though, the rings immediately began disappearing and vanished only a year after he had found them.

What Galileo didn’t know was that this happens every 14 or 15 years, and is known as “ring plane crossing.” Essentially, as Saturn moves around the sun it periodically orbits so that its rings are precisely edge on to Earth. Because they are so thin – relatively speaking – they thus began invisible to us.

Amateur and professional astronomers all across Earth are currently seeing a narrowing of Saturn’s rings. Efrain Morales Rivera and his backyard telescope in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico have captured images (see above). "The rings have narrowed considerably in the last year," he reports. "The Cassini division (a dark gap in the rings) is getting hard to see."

Wadly for Galileo, he stopped viewing Saturn when the rings disappeared. For him, that is bad luck, because at such times as the possibility of discovering extra Saturnian moons or even faint outer rings increase.In addition, it is also a good time to get a look at the unusually blue north pole of Saturn. In 2005 the Cassini – Huygens spacecraft flew over the northern hemisphere and found that the skies, unlike the golden clouds of the rest of the planet, were cloudless and a deep blue like Earth’s. Only Cassini has been able to see this, but now, thanks to the ring plane crossing, the northern hemisphere won’t be obscured by the rings."

Now that Saturn's rings are only open 8 degrees, we can finally view its northern hemisphere's beautiful teal blue colored belts and zones, which really did look blue through my 10-inch telescope," reports Dan Petersen of Racine, WisconsinOver the next months Saturn’s rings will continue to disappear, and will vanish entirely on the 4th of September, 2009.

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