Mysteries Swirl Around Cyclones At Saturn's Poles 67
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."
Original Story (Score:5, Informative)
Original story is at http://ciclops.org/view_event/91/Great_Storm_of_the_South [ciclops.org].
Damn! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How far down ? (Score:5, Informative)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Taylor_column_rising_ball.png [wikimedia.org]
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.