Electric Saturn

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

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tayga
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Re: Cassini infrared pix :Tethys & Mimas

Unread post by tayga » Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:31 pm

Thing is, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. :roll:
tayga


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promethean
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Re: Cassini infrared pix :Tethys & Mimas

Unread post by promethean » Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:47 pm

Has there been magnetic imaging of these moons ? Correlations to the images above?

From the JPL article :

"Scientists theorize that the Pac-Man thermal shape on the Saturnian moons occurs because of the way high-energy electrons bombard low latitudes on the side of the moon that faces forward as it orbits around Saturn. The bombardment turns that part of the fluffy surface into hard-packed ice. As a result, the altered surface does not heat as rapidly in the sunshine or cool down as quickly at night as the rest of the surface, similar to how a boardwalk at the beach feels cooler during the day but warmer at night than the nearby sand. Finding another Pac-Man on Tethysconfirmsthat high-energy electrons can dramatically alter the surface of an icy moon. Also, because the altered region on Tethys, unlike on Mimas, is also bombarded by icy particles from Enceladus' plumes, it implies the surface alteration is occurring more quickly than its recoating by plume particles. "

"ice" again..."hard-packed" no less..."CONFIRMS"!!!!!!

doesn't "high-energy electron bombardment" = CURRENT ? AAAAARRGH! :x
"History teaches everything,even the future." Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)

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StefanR
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Cassini Sheds Light on Cosmic Particle Accelerators

Unread post by StefanR » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:02 pm

Cassini Sheds Light on Cosmic Particle Accelerators
18 February 2013

During a chance encounter with an unusually strong blast of solar wind arriving at Saturn, the international Cassini spacecraft detected particles being accelerated to ultra-high energies, similar to the acceleration that takes place around supernova explosions.

Shock waves are commonplace in the Universe, for example in the aftermath of a stellar explosion as debris accelerates outwards in a supernova remnant, or when the flow of particles from the Sun – the solar wind – impinges on the magnetic field of a planet to form a bow shock.

Under certain magnetic field orientations and depending on the strength of the shock, particles can be accelerated to close to the speed of light at these boundaries. Indeed, very strong shocks at young supernova remnants are known to boost electrons to ultra-relativistic energies, and may be the dominant source of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that pervade our Galaxy.

Space telescopes reveal evidence for accelerated electrons at supernova remnant shocks as X-ray emission, but these observations are made at great distances and thus the orientation of the local magnetic field can only be poorly measured at best. Without this crucial information, it is difficult to gain a full understanding of the shock acceleration process.

Scientists want to understand how the acceleration of electrons in very strong shocks with large ‘Mach numbers’ depends on the angle between the magnetic field and a vector at right angles to the shock front. In particular, they are interested in what happens in a ‘quasi-parallel’ shock, where the field and vector are almost aligned, as may be found in supernova remnants.
Image
Shocks in the solar wind in the Solar System are much more accessible and can be studied in greater detail. To date, however, particle acceleration has only been seen in ‘quasi-perpendicular’ shocks, where the magnetic field and shock vector are almost perpendicular.

But this new study by Cassini describes the first detection of significant acceleration of electrons in a quasi-parallel shock at Saturn, coinciding with what may be the strongest shock ever encountered at the ringed planet.

“Cassini has crossed Saturn’s bow shock hundreds of times, recording typical Alfvén Mach numbers of around 12. But during one particular crossing in early 2007, we measured a value of ~100, during which time the shock was quasi-parallel,” describes Adam Masters of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan, and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Nature Physics.

The findings confirm that, at high Mach numbers like those of the shocks surrounding supernova remnants, quasi-parallel shocks can become considerably more effective electron accelerators than previously thought. This result sheds new light on the complex process of cosmic particle acceleration.

“Cassini has essentially given us the capability of studying the nature of a supernova shock in situ in our own Solar System, bridging the gap to distant high-energy astrophysical phenomena that are usually only studied remotely,” adds Dr Masters.

“The Cassini observations have given us a glimpse of a process never before seen directly, providing new information on how high-energy particles, like cosmic rays, are accelerated to such high velocities by magnetic fields throughout the Universe,” says Nicolas Altobelli, ESA’s Cassini project scientist.

“Electron acceleration to relativistic energies at a strong quasi-parallel shock wave” by A. Masters et al. is published in Nature Physics, 17 February 2013.

The electron observations were carried out using the Electron Spectrometer of the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer, and the Low-Energy Magnetospheric Measurements System of the Cassini Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument. The high Alfvén Mach number of MA ~ 100 was measured on 3 February 2007.
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... celerators
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini ... e20130219/
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

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Cassini Watches Storm Choke on Its Own Tail

Unread post by StefanR » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:08 pm

Cassini Watches Storm Choke on Its Own Tail
Image

Call it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA's Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself in this way anywhere in the solar system.

"This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane – but with a twist unique to Saturn," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, who is a co-author on the new paper in the journal Icarus. "Even the giant storms at Jupiter don’t consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again."

Earth's hurricanes feed off the energy of warm water and leave a cold-water wake. This storm in Saturn's northern hemisphere also feasted off warm "air" in the gas giant's atmosphere. The storm, first detected on Dec. 5, 2010, and tracked by Cassini's radio and plasma wave subsystem and imaging cameras, erupted around 33 degrees north latitude. Shortly after the bright, turbulent head of the storm emerged and started moving west, it spawned a clockwise-spinning vortex that drifted much more slowly. Within months, the storm wrapped around the planet at that latitude, stretching about 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) in circumference, thundering and throwing lightning along the way.

Terrestrial storms have never run into their own wakes – they encounter topographic features like mountains first and expend themselves. But Saturn has no land to stop its hurricanes. The bright, turbulent storm head was able to chomp all the way around the planet. It was only when the head of the storm ran into the vortex in June 2011 that the massive, convective storm faded away. Why the encounter would shut down the storm is still a mystery.

By Aug. 28, after 267 days, the Saturn storm stopped thundering for good. While Cassini's infrared detectors continue to track some lingering effects in higher layers of Saturn's atmosphere, the troposphere -- which is the weather-producing layer, lower in the atmosphere – has been quiet at that latitude.

"This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast," said Kunio Sayanagi, the paper's lead author and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. "The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth's atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles [12,000 kilometers] across."

The vortex grew to be as large as the giant storm known as Oval BA on Jupiter. But Oval BA and Jupiter's more famous storm – the Great Red Spot – are not thunder-and-lightning storms. Jupiter's storms also have a quiet center, unlike the violence at the center of Saturn's storms.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini ... e20130131/
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

seasmith
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Re: Electric Saturn

Unread post by seasmith » Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:58 am

Near Infrared (new)
Saturn's North Polar Hexagon

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegal ... _2456.html

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MrAmsterdam
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Re: Electric Saturn

Unread post by MrAmsterdam » Mon Feb 25, 2013 2:05 pm

That's a beautiful picture. Almost fractal like - one big hexagonal vortex, consisting of several vortices.

Did anyone notice the smaller vortex, down right, seems like it also has hexagonal characteristics. Would that be an artifact?
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. -Nikola Tesla -1934

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StefanR
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Measuring Saturn's 'Pulse'

Unread post by StefanR » Fri Mar 01, 2013 8:42 am

I haven't been able to rad that paper yet, but it seems interesting perhaps how this model or models are done.
Good to read at least in the article that there is more consideration for the plasma invironment and currents
going about. Wondering how they also explain the athmospheric vortices on the poles and the influence of the moons. Mind, there is an animation there to elucidate a bit how it functions, the model that is... ;)
Measuring Saturn's 'Pulse'
[...] Cassini has also found that the period at which the SKR’s power is modulated drifts over time, changing by as much as roughly 1 percent per year. Though this change seems small, the rotation rate of a body as massive as Saturn could not change that rapidly. This means that the small change of period rules out the possibility of the periodic signature changes being caused by a dynamic change within the planet. It is also not plausible for high order magnetic anomalies to drift fast enough to account for such large shifts. Even more intriguingly, Saturn’s northern and southern periodicities are different, and appear to vary with Saturn’s seasons, presenting scientists with an additional challenge to interpretation of their origin.

Jia’s first model moves the potential source of the changes from Saturn’s interior to the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. It imposes a vortical flow within the ionosphere, coupled to the upper atmosphere. The flow in the ionosphere drives currents into the magnetosphere along magnetic field lines. The rotation of a region of perturbed flow around the spin axis imposes periodicity on the magnetosphere.

Jia created a second model because the phenomena are even more complicated than originally thought. Based on the detection of two separate periods in a number of Cassini observations, a longer period thought to originate in the southern hemisphere and shorter period thought to originate in the north, the researchers have enhanced their model by adding a second vortex at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

These ionospheric vortex models are the first detailed quantitative models that reproduce most of the observed periodic magnetospheric features – including periodic signatures in the magnetic field, large-scale electric current flows at Saturn’s equator, periodic density enhancements, periodic "breathing" at the boundaries of Saturn’s magnetosphere and a periodic signature seen in the extended tail of Saturn’s magnetosphere as it gets blown out by the solar wind. [....]
1) " Driving Saturn's Magnetospheric Periodicities from the Upper Atmosphere/Ionosphere: Magnetotail Response to Dual Sources," Xianzhe Jia and Margaret G. Kivelson, Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 117, A11219, November 2012.
2) “Driving Saturn’s Magnetospheric Periodicities from the Upper Atmosphere/Ionosphere," Xianzhe Jia, Margaret G. Kivelson and Tamas I. Gombosi, Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 117, A04215, April 2012.
3) "The Variable Rotation Period of the Inner Region of Saturn's Plasma Disk," Donald A. Gurnett, Ann M. Persoon, William S. Kurth, et al., Science Volume 316, Issue 5823, 442-445, April 2007.
4) "Spontaneous Axisymmetry Breaking of the External Magnetic Field at Saturn," Peter Goldreich and Alison J. Farmer, Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics, Volume 112, Issue A5, A05225, May 2007. [...]
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini ... e20130209/
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

bdw000
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frozen Helium spiral-hexagon

Unread post by bdw000 » Fri Mar 01, 2013 9:57 am

check out this very interesting pic:

http://io9.com/5987458/a-spiral-through-frozen-helium

Notice how in the center it is the usual round spiral, but moving outwards it turns into a hexagonal shape.

I suspect this could have some sort of relationship to the hexagons shown on this website over the years (such as at the poles of Saturn, etc).

Sparky
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Re: frozen Helium spiral-hexagon

Unread post by Sparky » Fri Mar 01, 2013 3:40 pm

It seems to evolve into a hex very quickly....interesting... ;)
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Dotini
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Re: Electric Saturn

Unread post by Dotini » Wed Mar 06, 2013 9:16 am

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-064
Saturn accelerates particles to ultra high energies, according to new discovery by the Cassini mission.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

seasmith
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Re: Electric Saturn

Unread post by seasmith » Thu Apr 25, 2013 3:24 pm

~
Saturn's ring rain

Jack Connerney
Nature 496, 178–179 (11 April 2013) doi:10.1038/496178a
Published online 10 April 2013



Saturn's rings as observed today probably bear little resemblance to the rings that originally formed. They are highly evolved, much like our Solar System, albeit over a shorter span of time2, 4, 14. To understand when and how they formed, one needs to understand the processes that shaped the rings we see today. One of those processes — electromagnetic erosion — has projected an image of the rings upon the disk of Saturn7 and perhaps left clues in the rings as well4, 5, 6


http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 6178a.html


Saturn's rings are comprised of nearly pure water-ice objects of all sizes, from submicrometre-sized grains to embedded moonlets kilometres across. However, the vast majority of ring mass, equivalent to that of a 500-km icy sphere, is contained in objects ranging in size from centimetres to a few metres8. Such objects reside in Keplerian orbit about Saturn, and their motion lies well within the domain of Newtonian physics (classical mechanics). Indeed, many interesting features in the rings may be explained by the dynamics of a collisional, self-gravitating ensemble of particles confined to a thin disk in orbit about a central body, behaving like a dense gas, characterized by viscosity, temperature and pressure9. It may require coupled hydrodynamic and gravitational models, and a fast computer, to describe the collective motion of so many particles, but it remains a problem of classical mechanics.
By contrast, the motion of very small (submicrometre-sized) ice particles will be quite different, if they acquire sufficient electrical charge, for example by photoionization or exposure to dense plasma evolving from a micrometeorite impact.
Particles with a high charge-to-mass ratio (one electron charge per 1,000 water molecules is sufficient) gyrate about magnetic lines of force in response to the magnetic Lorentz force, which acts in a direction perpendicular to the magnetic field. The motion of such a particle can be described as the combination of a circular motion about the magnetic line of force and the motion of this 'guiding centre' along the magnetic field.

In essence, the particle is constrained to move along the magnetic field like a bead on a wire (Fig. 1).
[a swirling "bead" like water down a drain] -s]
These particles will slide [spin/orbit]-s ] along the magnetic field in response to the components of the gravitational and centrifugal forces that are parallel to the magnetic field, and in response to a third force, the 'magnetic mirror' force, which is parallel to the magnetic field and points in the direction of weaker magnetic-field strength (towards the 'magnetic equator'). The latter force is a simple function of the particles' velocity with respect to the magnetic field [Lorentztian -s]].

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... a-f2.2.jpg

(2 lrg 4 img, pls clk on url)


In the case of any other magnetized planet, such forces would quickly disperse small ring particles that acquire a charge. But Saturn is unique among all the magnetized planets of the Solar System in that its magnetic field is symmetric about its rotation axis10, 11; there is a unique pair of conjugate latitudes, north and south, that map to a specific radial distance in the ring plane. Mass excavated from the rings in the form of particles of high charge-to-mass ratio, if not returned to the rings and reabsorbed, must therefore be deposited at specific latitudes in Saturn's atmosphere12 (ring-plane conjugates). The current rate of mass erosion as a function of radial distance in the ring plane could be read13 from the variation with latitude of water influx at the top of Saturn's atmosphere — if only one could measure it.
O'Donoghue and colleagues did not measure water influx, but they did observe a good proxy for it: emissions of the H3+ ion.
Water introduced into the upper atmosphere facilitates the rapid chemical recombination of the major ionospheric (upper atmosphere) ions by charge exchange14, so a greater depletion of H3+-ion density will be observed at latitudes that receive more water.
The authors' measurements clearly show that water is being supplied, along magnetic field lines, to the ionosphere, from sources throughout the ring plane — a ring rain, as it is called.
Gaps in the rings are evidently weak sources, not surprisingly, as there is little ring material therein to be eroded. Their measurements also demonstrate that the current ring-erosion rate (as a function of radial distance) differs from that thought to have shaped the C-ring/B-ring boundary4 and the inner B-ring transparency5, 6 over tens of [xxxs] of years of evolution.
Whether the water is transported in the form of ions or, more efficiently, in the form of charged submicrometre grains is not yet clear. And much work remains to be done before the mass-erosion rate can be worked out, quantitatively, from H3+ emission intensities, because it has been difficult to precisely match variations in the observed ionospheric electron density15, 16 with models that use an exogenous water influx17, 18.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 96178a.pdf

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Hurricane at Saturn's North Pole

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Mon Apr 29, 2013 7:27 pm

NASA Probe Gets Close Views of Large Saturn Hurricane
NASA wrote:NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north pole.

In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane's eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph (150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.

"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "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."

Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. Although there is no body of water close to these clouds high in Saturn's atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial hurricanes are generated and sustained.

Both a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn's north polar vortex have a central eye with no clouds or very low clouds. Other similar features include high clouds forming an eye wall, other high clouds spiraling around the eye, and a counter-clockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.

A major difference between the hurricanes is that the one on Saturn is much bigger than its counterparts on Earth and spins surprisingly fast. At Saturn, the wind in the eye wall blows more than four times faster than hurricane-force winds on Earth. Unlike terrestrial hurricanes, which tend to move, the Saturnian hurricane is locked onto the planet's north pole. On Earth, hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as the planet rotates. The one on Saturn does not drift and is already as far north as it can be.

"The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that's likely why it's stuck at the pole," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.
This is typical of NASA's quickness to explain away things that it cannot understand, in terms that it can. But once something has been conceptualized in a certain way, it's hard to change. So scientists see rotation at the pole, and call it a hurricane. But there isn't any ocean underneath it, and there is very little water vapor in Saturn's atmosphere. The "hurricane" also doesn't have any inflow -- it's a circular rotation, not a cyclonic inflow. So what is the energy source, if it just sits there and goes around in a circle? I haven't studied Saturn much, but my first-blush interpretation would be that a polar current is spinning the hurricane by the Lorentz force.
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seasmith
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Re: Electric Saturn

Unread post by seasmith » Tue Apr 30, 2013 7:37 am

NASA Probe Gets Close-Up Views of Large Hurricane on Saturn
Both a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn's north polar vortex have a central eye with no clouds or very low clouds. Other similar features include high clouds forming an eye wall, other high clouds spiraling around the eye, and a counter-clockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... =4&t=12600



http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/ap ... icane.html

seasmith
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Re: Hurricane at Saturn's North Pole

Unread post by seasmith » Tue Apr 30, 2013 7:43 am

Charles,

Some members have spent a lot of time and trouble unifying common thread topics under single "Electric" titles,
to save time & clutter, and to improve global search efforts (which i know you appeciate ;) .
I've linked this thread under Electric Saturn.

just a suggestion
s

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CharlesChandler
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Re: Hurricane at Saturn's North Pole

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Tue Apr 30, 2013 8:01 am

I agree -- thanks!
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll spend the rest of the day sitting in a small boat, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes.

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