A clever use of radio signals from planetary spacecraft is allowing researchers to pierce the swirling clouds that hide the interiors of Jupiter and Saturn, where crushing pressure transforms matter into states unknown on Earth. The effort, led by Luciano Iess of Sapienza University in Rome, turned signals from two NASA probes, Cassini at Saturn and Juno at Jupiter, into probes of gravitational variations that originate deep inside these gas giants.
What the researchers have found is fueling a high-stakes game of compare and contrast. The results, published last year in Nature for Jupiter and this week in Science for Saturn, show that “the two planets are more complex than we thought,” says Ravit Helled, a planetary scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Giant planets are not simple balls of hydrogen and helium.”
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