In the first papers from NASA’s Cassini mission’s Grand Finale, scientists describe unexpectedly complicated phenomena found in the gap between Saturn and its rings.
Source: Cassini’s Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring ‘Rain’ & Other Surprises
From an origin of Life perspective. One of the most important aspects of Gunter Wachtershauser‘s fantastic Theory is a stable source of heat and chemically reactive gases. The generation of heat (20 Earth sized power plants!) in Saturn’s atmosphere is very intriguing to me
Saturn is wrapped in bands of winds, with the one at the equator traveling fastest and those to the north and south moving more slowly. When a loop-like structure of magnetic field aligns so that one end is in that equatorial band and the other is not, the equatorial wind tugs at the charged particles of plasma around it, which in turn skews the magnetic-field line.
The result that Cassini measured is an electric current as strong as 20 large terrestrial power plants combined. As a side effect, that current also produces heat in the atmosphere around it, which may help explain a long-standing mystery about Saturn. “One of the enigmas of Saturn’s thermosphere is, it’s hotter than expected,” Krishan Khurana, a magnetosphere scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author on the paper, told Space.com. “This provides a part of the answer.”
Awesome! Life in a methane ocean with a ferric/uranium information molecule???