Ripples in Saturn’s Rings Reveal Planet’s Core is Big and Jiggly

TheMightyChickadee writes:

Ripples in Saturn's Rings Reveal Planet's Core Is Big and Jiggly:

A team of astrophysicists looking at data from the Cassini spacecraft's tour of Saturn have estimated a new size for the planet's core. Studying gravitational effects on the icy rings, the team determined that Saturn's core is a combination of ice, rock, hydrogen, and helium about 50 times as massive as Earth, making it much more diffuse than previously thought.

"The conventional picture has it that Saturn's interior has a neat division between a compact core of rocks and ices and an envelope of mostly hydrogen and helium. We found that contrary to this conventional picture, the core is actually 'fuzzy': all those same rocks and ices are there, but they are effectively blurred out over a huge fraction of the planet," said Christopher Mankovich, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of a paper on the findings, published today in Nature Astronomy.

[...] The rocks and ice inside Saturn slowly give way to the more gassy parts of the planet as you move away from the core, he said. The team found that the core didn't have a clear-cut end point; rather, it had a transition region that made up about 60% of Saturn's entire diameter, making the core a huge part of the planet's total size and much larger part than the 10% to 20% of a planet's diameter that a more compact core would be.

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