The latest images sent by the European Space Agency (ESA) Cassini probe from the ringed planet show that the jets that appear to emanate from Saturn's F ring are, in fact, trails that leave "snowballs" for miles in diameter when traversing the disc.
Saturn's thin F ring is known for displaying curious dynamic characteristics – grooves, ripples, braiding, and "snowballs" – formed by the gravitational pull of the nearby moon Prometheus. Although most of these balls break when they collide with each other or under the action of tidal forces, the new images show hundreds of cases in which a fragment survives and passes through the F ring, leaving behind a trail of particles. of ice. These ice fragments collide with the ring at low speed, at about two meters per second, and generate contrails that can extend up to 40 to 180 kilometers above the plane of the ring . Sometimes a whole group of balls hits the F ring, giving rise to exotic figures .
The results were presented yesterday at the meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna (Austria).
