This odd magnetic field, and the NASA Cassini mission that spent months swooping through it, represent a rare opportunity: to probe the interior of a gas giant, usually so difficult to peer into.

Now, a new analysis of Cassini data has shown what might be happening inside Saturn to produce this strange magnetosphere.

Planetary magnetic fields are (usually) generated inside the planet, by something called a dynamo - a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, spinning a magnetic field out into space.

Because Saturn's magnetic field has been well characterized by the Cassini probe, Stanley and her colleague, planetary scientist Chi Yan of Johns Hopkins University, decided to use it to try to reverse-engineer what's happening in Saturn's mysterious, opaque interior.

Using powerful computer simulations, they entered Cassini data to try to reproduce the observed magnetic field.

Interestingly, the team's models also showed that, in spite of the apparent near-perfect axisymmetry of the magnetic field in observations, there might be a little bit of non-axisymmetry - less than 0.5 percent - at the poles, the region where Cassini data is the weakest.