Current Event 9

Super Storm on Saturn
Paul Walsh
http://www.astromart.com/news/news.asp?news_id=1184
5/19/2011 10:47 pm

This article talks about a super-duper huge storm which has unexpectedly occurred in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. This violent storm has started out like a simple disturbance that occurred as an early spring storm, but soon it exceeded the limits and appeared like a precursor for disaster of hot gas plumes that tend to destroy Saturn’s stratosphere. The storm has rapidly increased to about a 5,000 kilometers wide thunderstorm vortex. Scientists say that the storm like this is pretty rare-this is the sixth storm recorded since the first one found in 1876, and the last one happened in 1990. However, this is the first major storm observed by an orbiting spacecraft and studied with the thermal infrared wavelenghts, which means that the scientists have much more data to analyze and to prove the collosal force of this storm. The data from infrared observations are the key point for the researcers-they show them a lot of things like; what are the conditions inside the storm including temperature, winds and atmospheric composition of gasses. This data has showed that huge amounts of matter and energy had been transported around Saturn by this storm and that this has interrupted the planet’s weather pattern conditions.

The most surprising thing was that something that has started like an ordinary disturbance in the planet’s hemisphere has spread to unexpected limits threatening to seriously disturb Saturn’s higher layer of the atmosphere called stratosphere. A Stratosphere is part of the sky where commercial planes fly in order to avoid turbulences, so, I wouldn’t like to be in that Saturn plane . Another thing that has worried me while reading this article is that THIS SIMPLE DISTURBANCE HAS OVERGROWN IN AN INCONCEIVABLE STORM that tends to disturb wheather pattern on Saturn, and who knows which other doubt exists!!!