Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter
(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
Hurricane Sandy?was a city-swamping superstorm, but the huge vortex churning at Saturn's north pole puts terrestrial storms to shame.
This image, captured on 27 November by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, stares into the storm's sinister eye from 361,000 kilometres away. The spacecraft observed in infrared wavelengths, which can peer through the top layer of clouds to reveal the complex texture beneath.
In 2007, the Cassini team saw a huge hexagon-shaped structure about 25,000 kilometres across stretching over Saturn's north pole. But the planet was in the depths of its 15-year-long winter, when sunlight does not fall on the pole, and it was too dark to see what lurked within the structure. Spring lifted the gloom in 2009, and now the team has spotted this vast storm at the hexagon's core.
Cassini scientists have seen something like this before. In 2006, the spacecraft observed Saturn's south pole, where a storm two-thirds as wide as Earth was raging. That vortex was the first place in the solar system other than Earth where astronomers saw eye-wall clouds, a typical feature of hurricanes in which a bank of clouds towers above the central pit.
Now, the springtime sun reveals a similar vortex swirling in the north. Astronomers think these storms form in the same way as hurricanes, with warm, moist air rising from lower cloud layers. The storms may be permanent, or could come and go with the seasons.
Read more about the sixth planet from the sun in our Saturn and its moons topic guide.
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