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Mysteries Swirl Around Cyclones At Saturn's Poles
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 13, 2008 09:10 PM
from the call-the-wind-mariah dept.
from the call-the-wind-mariah dept.
Riding with Robots writes "New images of Saturn from the robotic spacecraft Cassini are shedding new light on monstrous storms that swirl at both poles of the ringed planet. 'These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth,' said one mission scientist. Cumulus clouds twirl around the vortices, betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath. But the storms do not disturb the bizarre hexagonal cloud formation previously reported."
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Cassini Probes the Hexagon On Saturn 280 comments
Riding with Robots sends us to a NASA page with photos of a little-understood hexagonal shape surrounding Saturn's north pole. "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." This structure was discovered by the Voyager probes over 20 years ago (here's an 18-year-old note on the mystery). The fact that it's still in place means it is stable and long-lived. Scientists have no idea what causes the hexagon. It's nearly big enough to fit four earths inside — comfortably larger than Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The article has an animation of clouds moving within the hexagon captured in infrared light.
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Solved (Score:3, Funny)
Extraterrestrials upping up the ante... (Score:5, Funny)
Original Story (Score:5, Informative)
Original story is at http://ciclops.org/view_event/91/Great_Storm_of_the_South [ciclops.org].
How far down ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would be curious to know how far down these things go. They look like Taylor columns to me, and in principle could go all the way to the other side, assuming there isn't a rocky core down there somewhere.
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What's a Taylor Column? Couldn't find anything on Wikipedia. A pointer to a source would help.
Thanks
Re:How far down ? (Score:5, Informative)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Taylor_column_rising_ball.png [wikimedia.org]
Parent
Re:How far down ? (Score:5, Informative)
Rotating fluids that are perturbed tend to form columns parallel to the axis of rotation called Taylor columns [mit.edu], after G.I. Taylor [harvard.edu]. On the Earth, these are sometimes seen over seamounts [washington.edu] in the oceans, and back when people assumed that Jupiter had a surface, it was hypothesized that the Great Red Spot was a taylor column over an obstruction on the surface below. This now seems highly unlikely, as a solid surface seems highly unlikely. Some more theory is here [google.com].
More recently, it has been hypothesized that the belts of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn (which are organized in pairs at opposite latitudes) may be Taylor columns [ucsd.edu] (i.e., that they may extend part or all the way through the planet as cylinders, keeping the same distance from the rotation axis). A Taylor column at the pole could in principle go all the way through the planet, if there was nothing below it, or could mark the size of a rocky core, thousands of kilometers down. Thus my original question.
This [emsb.qc.ca] explains the idea pretty well :
The proposed atmospheric cylinders were first demonstrated in a series of laboratory experiments 25 years ago to chart atmospheric flow in a wholly gaseous planet. Friederich Busse, University of Bayreuth, Germany, and John Hart, University of Colorado, Boulder, used liquid-filled spheres with high rotation speeds and imposed interior-exterior temperature differences. The experiments showed that the convective and most other disturbances in these fast-rotating spheres of fluid almost always produced cylindrical vortices parallel to the test vessel's spin axis, called Taylor columns.
Parent
That looks like "ringing" to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Eigen vibration galore baby! Deeep base.... VERY VERY deeep base. Cool.... Saturn is having a house party!
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Saturn Rings for your car [lightav.com]
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Hexagonal cloud? (Score:2)
Damn! (Score:4, Informative)
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We're going to have to rethink our our plans for Saturn's at mobile home parks.
Fixed.
Obligatory (Score:2)
These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth
So how many Katrinas is that?
Or perhaps more appropriately, how many Great Red Spots [wikipedia.org] is that?
Also, when it comes to storms, does size=strength?
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Time-lapse movies of the clouds circling the north pole show the whirlpool-like cyclone there is rotating at 530 kilometers per hour (325 miles per hour), more than twice as fast as the highest winds measured in cyclonic features on Earth. This cyclone is surrounded by an odd, honeycombed-shaped hexagon, which itself does not seem to move while the clouds within it whip around at high speeds, also greater than 500 kilometers per hour (300 miles per hour). Oddly, neither the fast-moving clouds inside the hexagon nor this new cyclone seem to disrupt the six-sided hexagon.
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from the TFA:
Time-lapse movies of the clouds circling the north pole show the whirlpool-like cyclone there is rotating at 530 kilometers per hour (325 miles per hour), more than twice as fast as the highest winds measured in cyclonic features on Earth. This cyclone is surrounded by an odd, honeycombed-shaped hexagon, which itself does not seem to move while the clouds within it whip around at high speeds, also greater than 500 kilometers per hour (300 miles per hour). Oddly, neither the fast-moving clouds inside the hexagon nor this new cyclone seem to disrupt the six-sided hexagon.
To distinguish it from hexagons which aren't six-sided?
DPS 2008 (Score:1)
Here's an idea: (Score:2)
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Airfare to Saturn is a little pricey these days, and if you think travel restrictions in the US are bad, just try and leave Saturn once you've arrived there...
The bees .. (Score:1)
Saturn = HUGE BALL OF WEATHER = Earth volume x763, (Score:1)
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My take on this is to give the common person some kind of reference that they can understand. If they just gave estimated wind speeds there's nothing there that normal daytime TV watching mouthbreathers can use to relate to what they know. Taking numbers out of thin air - if Hurricane Jerry Springer was 150 miles per hour then they can say that the Saturn Storms are 10 times more powerful. That gives a understandable frame of reference.
We all do it when we're talking to people outside of our field. With
Re:Saturn=HUGE BALL OF WEATHER = Earth volume x763 (Score:1)
>>We all do it when we're talking to people outside of our field.
Okay, unfortunately for me, your statement is exactly right with respect to the "hundreds of times bigger" phrase.
BUT... sprinkling "massive," "monstrous," "mammoth" throughout doesn't provide any useful context to a person that doesn't know that Saturn is HUGE (regardless of that person's respiratory orifice of choice).
It's like telling one's grandma "my laptop has a monstrous hard drive and massive amounts of RAM"
I move that all planet
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This grumpy rant is far too fun to let die. Elucidated and gramatically correct discourse? Not on your life!
I fully agree with the superlatives being done to the point of losing all meaning and I should have said that in my original response. 'Massive' has no meaning without an explanation. 'Massive in comparison to the surface area, covering fully 20%' would be far more in line with actually defining what they mean by using the word massive.
I long for the days when they taught actual science in schools
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'Massive in comparison to the surface area, covering fully 20%'
exactly - is that too much to ask? Enjoy your virtual margarita, sir or madam, you have earned it.
Standing waves (Score:1)
that's not simply a swirl... (Score:2)
That's just tessellation (Score:4, Funny)
The hexagonal clouds are no mystery. You see, Saturn is far away. It was never meant to be looked at up close. The Designers just didn't bother to waste a lot of polygons on it to approximate a sphere. It's just a low-poly model with some texturing tricks to hide the edges.
If we want to see it in higher resolution we have to get our spacecraft new graphics cards, that's all.
So here's my question... (Score:1)
How about earth's unusual shapes? (Score:2)
"Instead of worrying about Saturn's cyclones, how about worrying about earth's cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis?"
Do they come with unusual cloud formations?
Re:How about earth's unusual shapes? (Score:5, Insightful)
you know, when we study these things that are hard, we gain a greater understanding of other things as well. space exploration has always trickled down information to humanity.
Parent
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Case in point: Tang.
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Actually, yes, apparently they do [wintersteel.com]
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lets not forget this one [flickr.com]
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I wasn't intending to be funny, that was just the first link I found. Try this one [colostate.edu] for size. Slow down the framing and you'll find some definite geometric shapes occurring.
Re:How about earth's unusual shapes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How about earth's unusual shapes? (Score:5, Funny)
Do they come with unusual cloud formations?
The hexagonal clouds are not a mystery. They in fact prove that there are legislators somewhere else even dumber than the ones we choose for ourselves. Obviously the government of Saturn has declared the value of PI to be exactly 3 and the clouds are only obeying the law.
Sheesh.
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:How about earth's natural disasters? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...
Parent
How about feeding the poor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of worrying about Saturn's cyclones, how about worrying about earth's cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis?
Lets reserve the funding for this within our own earth please. On one hand, people talk about making the earth "green" and on the other hand, they blow up useful money into researching how the universe was built, whether Mars has life on it, how cyclones and tsunamis occur on Saturn. Does the scientific community not have its priorities right and consistent?
Instead of wasting time on Slashdot, how about selling your computer and donating that money (not to mention the time you'll save) to helping the world's hungry? There are people who go without food and you're squandering your time and money trolling the internet looking for things to complain about?
Parent
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Re:How about earth's natural disasters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a physicist, physical insight is always increased when you look at a broader problem. Studying cyclones only on the Earth is like trying to understand gravity while limiting your observations to distances between the ground and the height of a tree. You can come up with a great linear gravitational potential function, but you will never understand the physical significance of gravity. Only when you look at the broader problem do you begin to understand how gravity actually works. From there you can make assumptions, develop the math, and use it as a stepping stone to jumpstart other ideas, like classical electrodynamics (which itself provided the stepping stone for the complete rewrite of gravitational theory).
The benefits of studying weather patterns and geology outside of the narrow range that we observe on the Earth could be enormous. By observing the bizarre, we might be able to gain some insight into the mundane. These cyclones are a perfect chance. We have a pretty good idea on how cyclones work on the Earth, but the cyclones on Saturn are a mystery. By unraveling how these cyclones work, it should be possible to make a much more robust theory on how all cyclones will work.
Parent
I knew someone would post this (Score:1)
Re:How about earth's natural disasters? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes, because every problem can be solved faster by throwing more people at it! Why, if only we could convince 9 women to team up, they could have a baby in just 1 month!
Parent
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I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re:I can't help it... (Score:5, Funny)
If it were cyclones around Uranus, would it be a moon then?
Parent
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Get your head out of Uranus. You'll get "ring around the collar."
Or, like some constipated astronaut, Klingons ...
Besides, when did the Poles get to Saturn? We haven't even made it to Mars yet.