trash

Everybody's eye are on Mars lately, looking at boring old dirt again

Meanwhile down the road, there's some cool shit going on Saturn.
Like this cool hexagonal pattern around the northern pole.
Bizarre hexagon spotted in Saturn?s clouds - Space.com - MSNBC.com
It has a few astronomers baffled.
The pattern seems to be a product of a resonant harmonic set up in the atmosphere to me.

Then there's some more cool shit going down at the south pole.
One-eyed monster storm seen on Saturn - Space - MSNBC.com
The article says that this cyclone is not like tropical cyclones on Earth.
Well duh ! Lets start with it being over the south pole. That makes it a little tricky to set up with the corriolis effect.
That eye pattern is freaky ... but again, I would guess that it is also a function of resonance.

But back to the cyclone itself. Maybe I'm just having a lend of myself, but I cannot see why the overall structure is not any different from a normal cyclone. It's fueled by, well not hot water, but a temperature differential.
The warmer gas rises and flows to the poles as would be expected in any centrifugal system. But centrifugal force also pulls a cyclone apart and forms the eye of the cyclone in very big cyclones. Then a new high pressure region forms inside the center. If the cyclone is supermassive, it can wobble and wobbles have a nasty habbit of forming resonant oscillations.
In this case they deform the eye wall, the region where high pressure gas is rushing out and meeting up with the low pressure gas rushing in. With a second harmonic a double thread corkscrew forms giving it an eye pattern.

mudcrab

big saturn fan here thanks for the info and links trash and even though I only have a 70mm telescope have had some great viewing over the last week or so, and at a reasonable time of night.

Ok, so it looks a bit like a small pea with ears with my meade etx-70, it is Saturn

nomeat

Might be more useful in many aspects to have a closer look at Saturn's moon Titan and send plenty of landers, even some that could fly around and ...err... back home.
ESA - Space Science - Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

I find the idea of colonisation not so far fetched despite the extreme cold temperatures. There is so much fuel to burn and keep you warm and create the lacking greenhouse gas CO2. Heaps of water there too. Only problem for terraforming is that the atmosphere contains hydrogen cyanide

nomeat

-

Onefella

Aah! that would be from the giant spaceship I left hidden in Saturn's core.

It looks something like this.

CaptainZero

Hi trash et al.,

Just to clarify a bit...Coriolis force is ZERO at the equator and maximum at the poles...so...not really that difficult to set up cyclonic systems...


Cheers,

Kevin from Wycheproof.

trash

I have to think about that carefully.
I'm not quite sure it is a force, just an effect.

When it comes to the poles, I can understand the effect up to the point where the winds touch on 90 degrees latitude.

Think of standard cyclonic winds in the southern hemisphere.
They turn clockwise.
Now move those cyclonic winds to 80 degrees latitude. Which way is the winds moving at the higher latitudes (80-90 degrees). They're moving east to west. From the perspective of the pole, this is anti cyclonic wind, it is rotating anti clockwise with respect to the pole !

In the example of saturn, those winds are turning clockwise, the opposite direction, even though this is a cyclonic action.
That can mean one of two things. A low pressure system formed at lower latitudes and moved to the pole. Thinking about the katabatic action of the winds at the poles.... it's hard to think how this might happen.

The other way is that the cyclone formed at the pole.
Again, this might seem very unlikely again because of katabatic winds, but I can see how such a cyclone might have formed.

Rather than a rotating column of rising air, the cyclone formed a rotating column of decending air. With increasing strength the inverse convection pulls in the hotter rising air around the outside. This air rapidly cools and fuels the cyclone. Warmer air rushing in from outside further fuels the outter convection and rapid cooling. It takes on the appearence of a very strong anabatic tropical cyclone, but is really an upside down katabatic hurricane.

It's a very interesting weather system.

eeprommemory

maybe its a prank.

__________________
dangerous toys are lots of fun but you could get hurt!

trash

The water is going down Saturn's bunghole the wrong way !
There's some alien kid out there (a teaser) that's set back human understanding of the universe by 50 years.

tytower

Bugger , I thought I had the perfect hidding place . Close your eyes and count to ten again .