Saturn’s Giant Storms: Unveiling Centuries-old Atmospheric Mysteries

2023-08-15 22:30:00

A study has found that Saturn has huge storms that last for hundreds of years and affect the atmosphere, just like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is famous for being the largest storm in the solar system. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, analyzed radio waves emitted from Saturn in the scientific journal ‘Science Advances’ and found that traces of giant storms that occurred hundreds of years ago still remain deep in the atmosphere. said to have found It is known that every 20 to 30 years, a giant storm similar to a hurricane, but of a much larger scale, blows on Saturn. Not revealed. A giant storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, photographed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on February 25, 2011. Astronomers have found traces of giant storms from hundreds of years ago deep in the atmosphere. The dark streaks are the shadows of Saturn’s rings. Professor Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying gaseous planets in the solar system for over 40 years, investigated radio waves emitted from deep inside Saturn with the Carl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico, USA. did. Through this, the research team discovered an abnormal distribution of ammonia gas concentration in the atmosphere, and found that the cause was related to a giant storm that occurred in the northern hemisphere. Ammonia concentrations were found to be low at intermediate altitudes just below the uppermost ammonia ice cloud layer, but higher at lower altitudes, 100 to 200 km deeper. The research team believes that during megastorms, ammonia rains down and travels down from the upper atmosphere through re-evaporation, an effect that can last for hundreds of years. The study also revealed that Saturn and Jupiter, both composed of hydrogen gas, are very different. Tropospheric anomalies are also observed on Jupiter, but this is due to the difference between the white area and the dark band area, not due to storms like Saturn. The large differences between these gas giant neighbors run counter to existing hypotheses regarding giant storms occurring on gas planets and other planets, and might affect how we discover and study giant storms on exoplanets in the future, the team said. . “Radio observations help reveal phenomena such as heat transport, cloud formation, and convection in the atmospheres of giant planets,” said Li Cheung, a professor at the University of Michigan and lead author of the paper. By applying it to a wider cosmic context, it will be possible to broaden the boundaries of terrestrial meteorology.” Science team [email protected]<저작권자 © 전파신문, 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지>
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