Fact Sheet
Saturn’s Aurorae
Aurorae glow like halos around Saturn’s poles as seen by Hubble Space Telescope in October. Like the northern lights on Earth, Saturn’s aurorae are generated by the interaction between the planet’s magnetic field and high-energy particles streaming past it from the Sun. The curtains of light rise more than 1,000 miles above the ringed planet’s cloud tops, but can only be seen from space because they shine in the ultraviolet. The Pioneer and Voyager probes detected Saturn’s aurorae while studying the planet in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first Hubble pictures were obtained in 1994, but the space telescope’s recently installed imaging spectrograph provides 10 times the sensitivity of older instruments. (STScI)
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