European and American astronomers joined together to study a strange storm on Saturn in more detail than ever possible. The planets surface usually looks placid but every thirty years ( one year on Saturn ) something occurs under the clouds leading scientist to a "great planet-wide disturbance." There is now " a gigantic, violent and complex eruption of bright cloud material, which has spread to encircle the entire planet," said Leigh Fletcher of the University of Oxford, U.K., who lead the study on this event which appeared on May 19. An instrument from NASA first noticed the storm last December. Astronomers looked closer on the storm with an infrared camera on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal, Chile. Only the sixth such storm spotted since 1876, it's the only one to be observed by orbiting crafts and be studied by a thermal infrared light, which shows the different temperatures. They now can reveal hidden regions of the atmosphere and the substantial changes in temperature and winds. This specific storm "may have been originated deep down in the water clouds where a thunderstorm-like process triggered a huge 'convective plume'," scientists say, " just as hot air rises above a heater, a mass of gas which would have headed up and punched through Saturn's usually calm upper atmosphere. The huge disturbances interact with the circulating winds moving east and west and cause wild temperature swings high up in the skies." They continue to study the once-in-a-generation event which will lead to a better understanding of this planet and lead to better thoughts and ideas.
If you want to read more about this article please visit: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/110519_saturn.htm article by: European Southern Observatory
and World Science staff
No comments:
Post a Comment