Electric connection links Saturn and Enceladus

Various : Powerful electrical currents flow between Saturn and its sixth-largest moon, Enceladus. The Cassini spacecraft, since its arrival at Saturn in 2004, has passed the 500-km-wide moon 14 times and has gathered more data each time. Jets of gas and ice from Enceladus’s south pole become electrically charged, forming an ionosphere. The motion of the moon and its ionosphere through the magnetic bubble that surrounds Saturn acts like a dynamo, which in turn creates the currents. Cassini‘s UV imaging spectrograph spotted a patch of UV light in Saturn’s upper atmosphere near its north pole that indicated the presence of an electrical circuit; the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer’s electron spectrometer (CAPS-ELS) detected the electron beams. The process observed between Saturn and its satellite may be a universal one; Jupiter and its moon Io have a similar electrical current between them that appears to develop through a comparable process.