00:00New Scientist titled, Mysterious Movements and Stillness Baffle Scientists on Saturn's Moon.
00:06I thought this was such an interesting story because the data that we're seeing from this
00:10moon is so strange. It really is a mystery. The scientists are kind of at a loss to explain
00:16what's going on here. And it reminded me a little bit of our recent video we did on Titan.
00:22We had these radar images showing these huge moving things on Titan's surface,
00:26and we don't know what they are. This is another case where we have some strange things going on
00:31that we just don't understand. So let's take a look at this story. It's been a while since we
00:37visited Saturn's fascinating collection of moons. These objects range in size from the small moon
00:42atlas, which is only 13 kilometers across, all the way up to Titan, which is 50 times larger than
00:48Earth's moon and is the second largest moon in the solar system. It is a truly remarkable place.
00:54But today, we're not talking about any of those large moons. Instead, we're going to focus on
01:00one of Saturn's smallest inner moons, the moon Pandora. Scientists are still trying to understand
01:06what Pandora is made of, but they believe that it's probably an icy world with a rocky core,
01:11similar to many other moons of Saturn. What makes Pandora so fascinating is the fact that it orbits
01:17the planet in a very unusual way. It co-orbits with another small moon named Prometheus,
01:22and together, they form a sort of double moon system around Saturn. They orbit close to each
01:29other, and they also orbit the planet in a very unique shape. Their orbit is highly eccentric,
01:35which means that sometimes they get very close to the planet, and sometimes they are quite far away.
01:40This unusual orbit takes them close to Saturn's rings and within the magnetic field of the planet,
01:45and because of this, they get bombarded by charged particles of plasma from the planet.
01:50Because of this bombardment, it is thought that Pandora has a thin atmosphere, but until recently,
01:56we didn't know much about it. That's because Pandora is very small. It's only about 8 kilometers
02:01across. And it's also quite dark. It doesn't reflect much light from the sun, so it's difficult
02:07to observe with visible light telescopes. However, in 2019, scientists were able to use the Hubble
02:13Space Telescope to observe Pandora in ultraviolet light, and they made a fascinating discovery.
02:19They found that Pandora was emitting light in a very strange way. Normally, when an object emits
02:25light, it emits light uniformly in all directions. But the light coming from Pandora was highly
02:32concentrated around the equator of the moon. This is a very unusual phenomenon, and it suggests that
02:38there may be something very special happening at the equator of Pandora. Now, this discovery raised a
02:44lot of questions. But unfortunately, it also raised more problems for the scientists.
02:50Trying to solve this mystery, they tried to use the Hubble Space Telescope again, but this time in
02:55infrared light. They hoped that this would allow them to see the moon in more detail and learn more
03:00about its atmosphere. But they soon realized that something was very wrong. What they saw in the
03:05infrared light was not what they expected. They had expected to see the moon glowing in a uniform way
03:10like before. But instead, they saw that the moon was completely black. There was no glow at all. At
03:17first, they thought that maybe their equipment was broken, or maybe the weather on Earth was
03:21interfering with the signal. But after checking everything, they realized that this was not the
03:26case. Pandora was really not emitting any infrared light. This was a very strange observation, because if
03:33Pandora had no atmosphere at all, then we should have been able to see the glow of its surface in the
03:38infrared light. But the fact that we were seeing nothing at all meant that there must be something
03:43very unusual going on. Now, astronomers were baffled by this observation. They didn't know what to make
03:51of it. Some scientists thought that maybe Pandora didn't have an atmosphere at all. After all, it is a
03:57very small moon, and it's also very far away from Earth. Maybe the atmosphere was too thin to detect.
04:03Other scientists thought that maybe Pandora did have an atmosphere, but it was somehow transparent
04:08to infrared light. But this seemed very unlikely. Atmospheres are usually opaque to some degree,
04:14and it seemed unlikely that Pandora's atmosphere would be transparent to exactly the wavelength of
04:20light that they were trying to observe. Now, over the next few years, astronomers continue to try to
04:26observe Pandora in different wavelengths of light. They wanted to see if they could find any light at all
04:32coming from the moon. In 2021, they were able to get a break when they were able to observe a rare
04:37event. Pandora passed between Earth and the Sun, which allowed them to study the moon in visible light
04:43for a short time. They were hoping that maybe they would see some reflected light from the Sun,
04:48but they were surprised to find that Pandora was completely dark in visible light as well.
04:52Now, at this point, astronomers were completely baffled. They had observed Pandora in four different
04:58wavelengths of light, and they had never seen it glow at all. It was always completely black. And
05:04now, they had been observing Pandora for almost three decades. During that time, they had seen it go
05:10from being a faint dot in the sky to becoming a slightly brighter object. And yet, it had never once
05:17emitted any light that they could detect. Now, astronomers have been able to solve this mystery
05:23thanks to a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers
05:28were able to use data from the Cassini spacecraft to model the atmosphere of Pandora. They found
05:33that the atmosphere of Pandora is very thin, about 100 times thinner than Earth's atmosphere,
05:39but it is also very dense compared to other moons in the solar system. They believe that the
05:44atmosphere of Pandora is made up of mostly nitrogen and methane, with some carbon dioxide and hydrogen
05:50sulfide. The atmosphere is also very cold, about 170 degrees Celsius. So what's causing this
05:57strange glow that we've seen around the equator of Pandora? Well, according to the researchers,
06:03it is actually a mirage. Yes, you heard that right. Pandora has a mirage. The atmosphere of Pandora is so
06:10dense that it is causing light to be bent in a very unusual way. This is the same phenomenon that causes
06:17mirages on Earth. When light is bent by the atmosphere, it can create an image of an object that
06:22is not really there. In the case of Pandora, the mirage is creating a ring around the equator of
06:28the moon. This ring is not solid. It is just an illusion created by the bending of light. The reason
06:35why the atmosphere of Pandora is so dense is because the moon is so close to the planet Saturn.
06:41The gravity of Saturn is pulling the atmosphere of Pandora down towards its surface. This is also why
06:46Pandora is so dark. Its atmosphere is so thick that it is blocking the light from its surface.
06:51This is a very strange situation and it is unique to Pandora. No other moon in the solar system has
06:59an atmosphere that is both so dense and so opaque. Now this is a very exciting discovery because it
07:06means that we may have found the first moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere. This could
07:12be an important step in our understanding of how atmospheres form on other worlds. But there is still a lot
07:19that we don't know about Pandora. The atmosphere that the researchers modeled is just a very basic
07:25model. They couldn't take into account all of the complex interactions that are happening in Pandora's
07:30atmosphere. For example, they couldn't model the interaction between the atmosphere and Pandora's
07:36magnetic field. Pandora does have a magnetic field, although it is very weak. The magnetic field is caused by
07:43the interaction between the atmosphere of Pandora and the magnetic field of Saturn. The charged particles
07:49from Saturn's magnetosphere are bombarding Pandora's atmosphere, which creates a current in the moon's
07:55magnetic field. This current then generates its own magnetic field, which is what we are detecting.
08:01The interaction between the atmosphere and the magnetic field could be causing some very strange effects,
08:06such as auroras. The auroras are caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with the
08:12atmosphere of Earth. They are beautiful displays of light that can last for hours or even days. We don't
08:18know if Pandora has auroras or not, but it is certainly possible. The auroras could be one of the things
08:24that are causing the strange glow that we have seen around Pandora's equator.
Comments