Saturn’s core is an unexpectedly immense mixture of ice, rock, and gas, surprising scientists who are trying to figure out how the planet formed and evolved to the enigmatic world we see today.
Hidden inside the solar system’s god of plenty is an unexpected bounty: Saturn’s mammoth core, spanning up to 60 percent of the planet’s width. The newly measured core, revealed through subtle waves in Saturn’s rings, appears to be ice, rock, and gas, blended into a soupy mass with blurry edges.
“It’s huge,” says Chris Mankovich of the California Institute of Technology, one of the authors of a new study describing Saturn’s core in the journal Nature Astronomy. “It’s definitely not something we expected to find.”
The characteristics of Saturn’s immense heart have scientists rethinking how the ringed planet may have formed, and how it generates its strangely uniform magnetic field. “It’s just more complex than we thought was going to be the case,” says Johns Hopkins University’s Sabine Stanley, who was not part of the new study.
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