RING RIDDLE
NEW Hubble Space Telescope images have revealed strange marks on Saturn's rings - and scientists are baffled.
The light and dark smudges, also known as spokes, mark the start of the planet's so-called "spoke season."
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NASA scientists first spotted them over four decades ago during the Voyager Mission in the 1980s, but remain bewildered over the cause.
The smudges have previously been spotted in the years before and after Saturn's equinox, and Hubble last captured them around 15 years ago, during the Cassini mission.
The planet's next autumnal equinox is set to begin on May 6, 2025, and the marks can start to appear four years prior.
Hubble will continue to monitor the spokes, and stargazers can expect to see more as the equinox approaches.
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What's behind the spokes?
NASA scientists intend to use the images to reach a better understanding of what causes the ghostly spots, and why they are seasonal.
"Thanks to Hubble's OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before," said NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon in a statement.
"The precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season,” Simon added.
While the reason for the seasonal marks remains unknown, experts have a few theories.
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"The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet's variable magnetic field," NASA said in a press release.
Scientists think that smaller, icy particles can become charged, which temporarily floats them above the rest of the larger particles and boulders in the rings.
A similar phenomenon also happens on Earth, but we see it as the northern lights.
“It’s a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn — for now at least,” Simon said.
By adding the latest images to an archive of data from the Voyager and Cassini missions, NASA hopes to crack the mystery of the spoke phenomenon once and for all.
The images are the latest in a string of recent galactic discoveries.
Last month, NASA spotted a second Earth-size, habitable planet orbiting a small star 100 light-years away, it announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting.
Then just weeks later, an asteroid the size of a box truck made one of the closest passes of planet Earth ever recorded, NASA announced in a statement.
It’s possible that other planets with rings could experience similar events, but for now, they’ve only been observed on Saturn’s rings.