Radio images of Saturn show traces of past storms.The broad bright band near the top of the image is the aftermath of the 2010 storm.
RJ Hsu and I de Pater
If it rains on Saturn, it will be a downpour. Every 10 to 20 terrestrial years, Saturn experiences huge storms several kilometers wide. This storm looks like a giant white patch in the atmosphere, with a tail stretching around the planet. Scientists now know that remnants of these storms have persisted in Saturn’s atmosphere for hundreds of years.
They discovered these traces using the Karl G. Jansky Super Large Array in New Mexico to map Saturn’s ammonia. Ammonia moves in the atmosphere of giant planets in the same way that water moves in Earth’s atmosphere. chen lee In 2010, researchers at the University of Michigan and their colleagues sought to investigate how Saturn behaved in the aftermath of Saturn’s recent storm. Instead, they found evidence that Saturn’s atmosphere was still being affected by storms as early as 1876, and possibly more. Before.
“We know these storms are big, but we never thought, based on our daily weather experience, that they could leave such a long trail hundreds of years from now. I did,” Lee says. “On Earth the weather comes and goes, but on Saturn the weather does not.”
The anomaly they found was A region of the atmosphere that is depleted of ammonia at high altitudes but relatively abundant at low altitudes. These probably correspond to regions where ammonia rained down from the upper atmosphere, possibly in the form of hail-like ‘mushrooms’, and then evaporated and drifted into the lower atmosphere as a vapor.
“On Earth, heavy rains create puddles on the ground,” Lee says. “But a giant planet has no surface, so where does that rain go? It just evaporates.”
They found anomalous patches corresponding to all six megastorms observed on Saturn since 1876, and one more that is thought to be from a storm that occurred decades earlier. did. How the anomaly has moved since the storm intensified may help us learn about Saturn’s internal winds and ocean currents.
Surprisingly, these observations of Saturn’s weather contrast sharply with similar observations of Jupiter’s storms, which could help shed light on the inner workings of gas giants more generally. there is a possibility. “They have similar compositions and similar gravitational forces, so why are the weather so different?” says.
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