Oxygen Found On Saturn's Moon

Video: Oxygen Found On Saturn's Moon

Video: Oxygen Found On Saturn's Moon
Video: OXYGEN FOUND ON SATURN'S MOON 2024, March
Oxygen Found On Saturn's Moon
Oxygen Found On Saturn's Moon
Anonim

An international team of researchers reported the capture of oxygen on one of Saturn's moons. Experts believe that this gas may be present on all of the gas giant's icy moons.

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Previously, researchers have identified the atmosphere on Dione (given its extreme rarefaction, scientists say - the exosphere), and now they managed to find out something about its composition. To do this, we had to shovel old data from the plasma detector of the Cassini apparatus.

As previously assumed, oxygen was found on Dion (the sensor itself caught its ions, but they occur during the ionization of neutral atoms, which are not so few there). The source of this gas is quite understandable: charged particles from Saturn's powerful radiation belt divide the water ice into hydrogen and oxygen.

“Energetic particles fall into the ice surface, hydrogen is lost, and molecular oxygen remains as an exosphere. We now know that this is happening on the moons of Saturn, as well as Jupiter, says co-author Andrew Coates of University College London. "And it can also happen in extrasolar planetary systems."

Thus, if we talk only about the Saturn system, the oxygen Dione joined in this regard to Rhea and the rings.

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