{"id":126387,"date":"2021-08-17T09:23:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T16:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/ripples-in-saturns-rings-reveal-the-planets-giant-slushy-core"},"modified":"2021-08-17T09:23:09","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T16:23:09","slug":"ripples-in-saturns-rings-reveal-the-planets-giant-slushy-core","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/ripples-in-saturns-rings-reveal-the-planets-giant-slushy-core","title":{"rendered":"Ripples in Saturn\u2019s rings reveal the planet\u2019s giant, slushy core"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ripples-in-saturns-rings-reveal-the-planets-giant-slushy-core2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Saturn\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Hidden inside the solar system\u2019s god of plenty is an unexpected bounty: Saturn\u2019s mammoth core, spanning up to 60 percent of the planet\u2019s width. The newly measured core, revealed through subtle waves in Saturn\u2019s rings, appears to be ice, rock, and gas, blended into a soupy mass with blurry edges.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s huge,\u201d says <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gps.caltech.edu\/people\/christopher-r-mankovich\" target=\"_blank\">Chris Mankovich<\/a> of the California Institute of Technology, one of the authors of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41550-021-01448-3\" target=\"_blank\">a new study describing Saturn\u2019s core in the journal <i>Nature Astronomy<\/i><\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely not something we expected to find.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The characteristics of Saturn\u2019s immense heart have scientists rethinking how the ringed planet may have formed, and how it generates its strangely uniform magnetic field. \u201cIt\u2019s just more complex than we thought was going to be the case,\u201d says Johns Hopkins University\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/eps.jhu.edu\/directory\/sabine-stanley\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sabine Stanley<\/a>, who was not part of the new study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturn\u2019s 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\u2019s god of plenty is an unexpected bounty: Saturn\u2019s mammoth core, spanning up to 60 percent of the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}