Discovering the Secrets of Saturn’s Giant Storms: Unveiling the Unique Atmosphere of the Gas Giant

2023-08-13 06:26:55
It was the largest storm ever observed in the solar system, extending over 16,000 km in width. It is called the Great Red Spot, and it decorated the surface of Jupiter for hundreds of years, and it was thought to be unparalleled in our solar system. But a new study shows that Saturn also has long-lived giant storms with deep impacts in the atmosphere that have persisted for centuries. According to the press release published on the “Your Alert” website on August 11, the study was conducted by a team of astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who studied radio emissions from the planet, which come from below the surface, and found disturbances. Long lasting ammonia dispensing. The study has been published in the journal Science Advances. Giant storms occur on Saturn approximately every 20 to 30 years (Emiki de Peter – University of California, Berkeley) And unlike Earth’s hurricanes, no one knows why the huge storms occur in Saturn’s atmosphere, which consists mainly of hydrogen and helium with traces of methane, water and ammonia. “Understanding the mechanisms of the solar system’s largest storms places the theory of hurricane occurrence in a broader cosmic context, challenging our current knowledge and pushing the boundaries of terrestrial meteorology,” said study lead author Cheng Li, a former fellow at UCLA and now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. The research team used radio emissions from the depths of the planet to study the giant gas planets (Jupiter and Saturn), which were detected by the Carl J. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. The researchers say that they sought to study what is beneath the layers of visible clouds on the giant planets, and since chemical reactions and dynamics change the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, studying what goes on below these layers of clouds is required to determine the composition of the true atmosphere of the planet. Dynamic, physical and chemical including heat transfer, cloud formation and convection in the atmospheres of giant planets at the global and local scales”. The team used radio emissions from the depths of Saturn to study the impact of storms (RJ Salt – Emiki de Peter) storms and the concentration of ammonia As reported in the new study, the team found something surprising in the radio emissions from the planet, as they found anomalies in the concentration of ammonia gas in the atmosphere, which they conclude is related to previous events of massive storms in the planet’s northern hemisphere. According to the team, they found that the concentration of ammonia is lower at mid-elevations, below the upper cloud layer consisting of ammonia and ice, but it becomes dense at lower altitudes, deeper than 100 to 200 kilometers in the atmosphere. The researchers believe that ammonia is transported from the upper atmosphere to the lower atmosphere through precipitation and re-evaporation processes. Moreover, this effect could last for hundreds of years. The study also revealed that although both Saturn and Jupiter are made of hydrogen gas, these two gas giants differ markedly. Whereas Jupiter has a tropospheric anomaly in its atmosphere, this anomaly is related to its bands (white lines) and belts (dark lines) on its surface, and is not caused by storms as in the case of Saturn. The great difference between the neighboring gas giants challenges what scientists know about the formation of giant storms in the gas giants and other planets, so identifying and understanding what these differences are will be useful in studying similar exoplanets.
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