Discovery
Immediately after the discovery of Jupiter's decametric radio emissions in 1955, attempts were made to detect a similar emission from Saturn, but with inconclusive results. The first evidence that Saturn might have an internally generated magnetic field came in 1974, with the detection of weak radio emissions from the planet at the frequency of about 1 MHz.
These medium wave emissions were modulated with a period of about 10 h 30 min, which was close to Saturn's rotation period. Nevertheless, the evidence available in the 1970s was too inconclusive and some scientists thought that Saturn might lack a magnetic field altogether, while others even speculated that the planet could lie beyond the heliopause. The first definite detection of the saturnian magnetic field was made only on September 1, 1979, when it was passed through by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, which measured its magnetic field strength directly.
Read more about this topic: Magnetosphere Of Saturn
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)