Saturn day length veiled by a moon
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Geysers on the little moon Enceladus are weighing down Saturn’s magnetic field so much that the field is rotating slower than the planet, Iowa researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.
The phenomenon makes it nearly impossible to measure precisely the length of the Saturn day using normal techniques. A Saturn day is about 10.5 hours.
Gas particles emitted by the geysers form a doughnut-shaped torus of ionized gas around Saturn, exerting a drag on the planet’s magnetic field. The length of the day measured by the spacecraft Cassini is about six minutes longer than the day recorded by Voyager in the 1980s.
