TheGreat White Spotis the nickname with which astronomers know a unique meteorological phenomenon in the solar system, astorm of colossal proportions developing on Saturnand it reaches practically the size of the Earth. The disturbance expands to surround the entire planet forming a ring of white clouds that have given it its name. A group of astronomers led by the Spanish Agustín Sánchez Lavega, director of the Planetary Sciences Group at the University of the Basque Country, has described the behavior of the storm for the first time and has found thatit’s not superficial, ruling out the possibility that it is generated by solar radiation. Thewinds would have their origin in the internal heat source of Saturn.
El trabajo, which occupies the cover of the latest issue of the prestigious magazineNature, establishes the first hypotheses about a phenomenon that has represented “a challenge to understanding”, since the storm on the ringed planet, which normally repeats every 29.5 Earth years, has occurred this timenine years earlier than expected. Although the storm originated in a specific focus, it quickly lengthened and produced a distortion in the atmosphere generating a ring of white clouds that enveloped the planet in less than two months and disturbed its seemingly calm vision. According to Sánchez Lavega, “a As of today, more than six months after the storm erupted, its original but weakened focus is still active, representing a major surprise and a challenge in understanding these violent meteorological events. “
The images have been captured by the Hubble space telescope, the Cassini probe -which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004- and ground-based telescopes, and they seek to know the origin of the storms, which scientists estimate is 250 kilometers deep in a layer of the atmosphere with water vapor. Saturn’s storms are in a way atesting benchof the physical mechanisms underlying the generation ofviolent storms that occur in the equatorial and tropical regions of the Earth, or in phenomena as close as the calls“cold drops”.
This is the fourth cover ofNature that Sánchez Lavega gets. The previous ones, published in 1991, 2003 and 2008, were related to research on Saturn and Jupiter. Researchers from the Miguel de Cervantes European University of Valladolid also participated in this study; from the Esteve Duran Observatory Foundation in Seva (Catalonia); the Calar Alto Observatory in Almería; from the University of Oxford in Great Britain, and from the Paris Observatory in France. An international network of observers coordinated from the UPV / EHU has also participated decisively, who have selflessly contributed to taking images of the planet.
