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.

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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.

These Are The NASA Water Jets and it can launch 450,000 gallons of water in a few seconds! 🚀 🌊.

Credit: NASA

Expedition 65 — NASA Astronaut Megan McArthur and ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet answer questions from the Children’s Museum of Saratoga.

Take a trip with us to the center of Mars! NASA’s InSight Lander has detected hundreds of quakes with its seismometer since landing on the Red Planet in November 2018. Those seismic events have shed light on the crust, mantle, and core of the planet, as well as how the separate layers formed. Those findings may offer insight into how all rocky planets formed, including Earth.

Speakers:
• Mark Panning, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
• Amir Khan, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich.
• Sabine Stanley, Johns Hopkins University.