Chandra Release - June 27, 2005

Visual Description: Saturn's Rings

This composite image of Saturn blends golden optical light with shimmering X-ray highlights, turning the planet’s iconic rings into a jeweled halo. Saturn’s broad, luminous bands, captured in crisp detail from Hubble, are speckled with ethereal blue glimmers where solar X-rays strike oxygen atoms in the icy particles, causing them to fluoresce.  The X-rays from the rings as detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory mostly come from the B ring, which is about 25,000 kilometers wide and is about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) above the surface of Saturn (a bright white inner ring in the optical image). An apparent concentration of X-rays on the morning side (left side in the image) could be due to additional solar fluorescence from clouds of fine ice-dust particles that are lifted above the surface of the rings by meteoroid impacts on the rings.