The discovery of the first wind-driven aurora sheds light on a strange phenomenon playing out below Saturn’s stormy atmosphere.
, revealing, finally, the length of a day on Saturn: 10 hours, 33 minutes, and 38 seconds.
He didn’t have long. “Cassini was about to crash,” says Stallard. While Cassini took one last look at the north pole’s lighthouse, Stallard waited at the observatory. Between June and August, whenever Saturn could be seen as a patch of fuzzy light in Earth’s sky, he aimed Keck at its north pole and soaked up the data.
But the team discovered that high-altitude, low-density winds, moving at speeds of up to 6,700 miles per hour, rush over the north pole. On either side of this prevailing wind current are two vortices, two swirls spinning in opposite directions. This twin-cell wind system itself fully rotates. The entire thing resembles a fairground ride from hell.
“It’s nice to have a solution,” says O’Donoghue. It’s also nice to discover that this errant radio lighthouse is accompanied by a novel type of aurora.
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