NASA's Hubble Telescope caught breathtaking images of 'northern lights' on Saturn by on Sep 5, 2018, 6:06 AM Advertisement
 - Earth isn't the only planet over which the northern lights appear from time to time.
- Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn also have their own magnificent auroras.
- NASA just released stunning images of Saturn's aurora, taken in 2017 by the Hubble space telescope.
In 2017, the Hubble space telescope spent seven months flying around Saturn, using a spectrograph to take pictures of Saturn before and after the summer solstice — and when NASA released the images they revealed an unusual and breathtaking phenomenon - Saturn's own 'northern lights'.
Earth isn't the only planet over which the northern lights appear from time to time; Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn also have their own beautiful auroras — and before and after the summer solstice is the best time to catch them. "Because the atmosphere of each of the four outer planets in the Solar System is — unlike the Earth — dominated by hydrogen, Saturn's auroras can only be seen in ultraviolet wavelengths — a part of the electromagnetic spectrum which can only be studied from space," the ESA said in a press release. 
The northern lights are particularly bright at two specific times of day: both at dusk and just before midnight. Whether or not the they're visible depends on two factors: the solar winds — currents of charged particles — and on Saturn's rapid rotation. A revolution on Saturn only takes about 11 hours. You can watch an animation of Saturn's northern lights here: SEE ALSO: India is spending $1.4 billion on its first manned space mission
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