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posted by janrinok on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the thar-she-blows! dept.

The atmosphere of the planet Saturn, a gas giant 10 times bigger than the Earth consisting mostly of hydrogen, has a wider, more intense jet stream than all the planets in the solar system. Winds gusting at speeds of up to 1,650 km/h blow from West to East in the equatorial atmosphere, thirteen times the strength of the most destructive hurricane force winds that form on the Earth's equator.

This huge jet stream also extends about 70,000 km from north to south, more than five times the size of our planet. There is as yet no theory capable of explaining the nature of this stream nor the sources of energy feeding it. Back in 2003 the same team warned in an article, published in Nature, of the drastic reduction in winds on the cloud level with respect to what had been observed when the Voyager space probes visited the planet.
...
By studying the movement of the clouds that formed the white spot (an enormous storm of about 7,000 km) and of those present in its surrounding areas, the researchers were able to obtain new, valuable information about the structure of the planet's huge equatorial jet stream. Furthermore, the researchers established the heights reached by the different atmospheric structures and determined that the winds increase dramatically the lower they go. They reach speeds of 1,100 km/h in the upper atmosphere but achieve up to 1,650 km/h at a depth of about 150 km. Furthermore, while the deep wind is stable, in the upper atmosphere the speed and width of the equatorial stream are highly changeable, perhaps due to the seasonal insolation cycle on Saturn, and their intensity is increased by the changing shadowing of the rings above the equator.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:27PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:27PM (#426132) Journal

    portion of the atmosphere is moving 1650 km/h relative to what?

    Same occurred to me. There is no fixed point of reference, an no way to distinguish the planetary surface from the atmosphere.

    The human mind seems ill-prepared to comprehend gas giant planets.

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