A hurricane-like storm two-thirds as wide as the Earth is raging on Saturn's south pole, new images from the Cassini spacecraft reveal. Such clear hurricane-like features have never before been seen on any other planet, but scientists are not sure what is causing them.
The dark eye of the "hurricane" spans about 8000 kilometres and is surrounded by rings of clouds that tower about 30 to 75 kilometres above it. Watch a 0.6 mB video of Saturn's storm taken over a period of three hours.
These eye-wall clouds have never been seen anywhere other than on Earth, where they form in a process of convection when moist air flows across an ocean and rises. They drop rain in a ring around a region of falling air, which is the eye of a hurricane.
But Saturn's storm also differs from hurricanes on Earth because it is fixed in place ? above the south pole ? and is not powered by an ocean, since Saturn is a gaseous planet.
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