Monster Hurricane On Saturn Spotted By Cassini [Photo]

A monster hurricane was spotted on Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Scientists were treated to beautiful high-resolution photos and video, which show the behemoth storm swirling around Saturn’s north pole.

The hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles wide, or about 20 times larger than the average hurricane’s eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds traveling around the hurricane’s edge are moving as fast as 330 miles per hour.

Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, recalled:

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth. But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

The monster Saturn hurricane is surprising, not only for its resemblance to the storms on Earth but also for its beauty. At first glance, the monster storm looks like a red rose with green surrounding it. Scientists believe that the storm has been churning for years.

The gas giant’s north pole was dark when Cassini first arrived in 2004 because the planet was in the middle of its north polar winter. While it waited for a glimpse, the NASA probe detected a vortex. However, it was not able to view the northern hemisphere until the passing of the equinox in August 2009.

Also, unlike the hurricanes on Earth, Saturn’s monster hurricane has not drifted. Instead, the bright red storm remains stuck at the north pole because it is already as far north as it can go. Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, explained, “The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole.”

The image of the monster hurricane was captured on November 27, 2012 and is one of the first views of Saturn’s sunlit north pole. The image’s colors have been adjusted. While the green colors indicate low clouds, the red indicates high.

[Images via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI]