Cassini encountered the auroral region
at a distance of 247 millionilometers from Saturn's cloud tops (about 4 times Saturn's radius).
6-hour component originates from the northern auroral region
The constellation formation will allow the three spacecraft to be positioned simultaneously within a single "current sheet" within the Earth's auroral region
Known as electrojets, these high-speed winds may explain how energy from the auroral regions
spreads around the planet.
Time-lapse images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's imaging spectrograph reveal that within the auroral regions
, "flares come up for 10 seconds and become as bright as anything else and then go away to almost nothing," Clarke told SCIENCE NEWS.