Mexico, 31 August. – The Hubble Space Telescope has created a series of photographs of the Northern Lights of Saturn, the most complete of this phenomenon so far.
The snapshots were taken with the spectrograph of the telescope, before and after the summer solstice in the northern "ringed planet", conditions that resulted in a better visualization of the aororea area.
On earth aurora are mainly created from the particles emitted by the sun in the form of solar wind, which are related to the magnetic field, which acts like a giant shield.
The solar wind particles can be captured in the earth's magnetosphere that is activated and after following the lines of the magnetic field to the poles, where they interact with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper layers of the atmosphere, it is that the spectacle is generated visually from the aurora & # 39; s.
According to the European Space Agency (ESA, for its abbreviation in English), this type of phenomenon occurs on Saturn, because the atmosphere is rich in hydrogen, therefore the aurora of the "gas giant" can only be seen in ultraviolet wavelengths .
The observations let astronomers control the behavior of the aurora at the north pole of Saturn for a considerable period.
The images show a large diversity of emissions with variable properties, which are influenced by the solar wind and the rotation of that planet, which lasts 11 hours.
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