By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 4:19 PM on 24th September 2010
Glowing like a mysterious planet from an episode of Star Trek, this is actually Saturn's aurora as it shimmers green light.
These new images show Saturn's aurora over a two-day period and are helping scientists understand what drives some of the solar system's most impressive light shows.
The false-colour image was composed from 65 single shots taken by the spacecraft Cassini on 11 November 2008.
Scientists hope studying Saturn's aurora will give them more information about our own Northern and Southern Lights.
This image is composed from 65 single shots taken by the spectrometer on Cassini on 11th November 2008. The green glow around the south pole is an aurora like on Earth
A video and images are part of a new study that, for the first time, extracts information about Saturn’s aurora from the entire catalogue of images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) aboard Cassini.
The new, false-colour images show Saturn's aurora glowing in green around the planet's south pole over a 20 hour period, about two days on Saturn.
‘Detailed studies like this of Saturn's aurora help us understand how they are generated on Earth and the nature of the interactions between the magnetosphere and the uppermost regions of Saturn's atmosphere,’ said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth's northern and southern lights.
A composite of four single shots which shows how polar lights on planet Saturn change of time
Particles from the solar wind are channeled by Saturn's magnetic field toward the planet's poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas in the upper atmosphere and emit light.
On Saturn, however, auroral features can also be caused by electromagnetic waves generated when the planet's moons move through the plasma that fills its magnetosphere.
Cassini's data will be presented at the Europlanet conference in Rome today.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1314897/Saturns-Northern-Lights-Incredible-new-Nasa-images-planets-glowing-poles.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz10iN2ScWD
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