The Cassini spacecraft observed spiral density waves in the rings of Saturn which can be used to probe its interior structure and rotation.
planetary interiors
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Ancient Impact’s Seismic Waves Reveal Pluto’s Ocean, Core
By modeling the waves produced by a massive, ancient impact, scientists have begun to unlock the secrets of Pluto’s interior.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
The Freshest Mineral Water in the Solar System
The water-rich plumes erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus show the chemical signs of water-rock interactions deep within the moon, further implicating Enceladus as a potential habitat for life.
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Jupiter’s Galilean Moons May Have Formed Slowly
A new model is the first to simultaneously explain many of the moons’ characteristics, including their mass, orbits, and icy composition
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Massive Collision Cracked Young Jupiter’s Core
The gas giant’s interior reveals evidence of an ancient impact.
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Webb Telescope May Detect Minerals from Shredded Worlds
The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope should be able to measure the composition of vaporizing exoplanets, giving clues about the makeup of their cores, mantles, and crusts.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Searching for Signs of Marsquakes
Researchers use high-resolution images of Mars’s surface to look for signals of coseismic displacement.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
How Did Venus Get its Youthful Surface?
Catastrophic lithospheric recycling is unlikely to be the cause of Venus’s young surface from mantle convection models constrained by offset between the center of mass and center of shape of planet.
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New Juno Data Reveal Four Key Secrets of Jupiter
Deep clouds, polar storms, lopsided gravity, and a uniformly rotating interior demonstrate that the gas giant plays by different rules than Earth.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Time, Tides, and Wandering Poles
Models of Neptune’s moon Triton reveal curious behavior in how tidal forces and mass anomalies cause the poles to reorient their location.