Mysterious Twist Found in Saturn's Electric Ring

An invisible donut of trapped, hot particles surrounding Saturn is all bent out of shape--a finding that astronomers can't yet explain.A similar "ring current" phenomenon occurs around Earth as a relatively stable donut when present, but new Cassini spacecraft images show Saturn's loop is a lopsided mess."It's curious that Saturn's ring current isn't symmetric," said Don Mitchell, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who helped examine the images beamed back to Earth. "We think the solar wind is squishing the sunward side of the ring current, kind of like a wind sock."

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