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Huge 'hurricane' rages on Saturn
A hurricane-like storm, two-thirds the diameter of Earth, is raging at Saturn's south pole, new images from Nasa's Cassini space probe reveal. Measuring 5,000 miles (8,000km) across, the storm is the first hurricane ever detected on a planet other than Earth.
Scientists say the storm has the eye and eye-wall clouds characteristic of a hurricane and its winds are swirling clockwise at 350mph (550km/h).
However, unlike Earth hurricanes it seems stuck at the pole, not drifting.
"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," Dr Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology said. "Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there."
Though Jupiter's Great Red Spot storm moves counter-clockwise, and is far bigger than the storm on Saturn, it does not have the eye and eye-wall that mark out a hurricane. ...
The Saturn storm is bigger not only in diameter than an Earth hurricane, but in height too, with a ring of huge clouds towering 20-45 miles (30-70km) above the well-developed eye - two to five times higher than in storms on Earth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6135450.stm
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