Guest guest Posted November 22, 2007 Report Share Posted November 22, 2007 A wonderful write-up by Dr. Robert Svoboda www.drsvoboda.com. Enjoy... Saturn is the only planet in our solar system that is lighter than water.Its “ringlight” is so much brighter than Earth’s full moonlight that it prevents lightning from being visible on Saturn’s surface.Saturn is the windiest locale in our solar system, with speeds of 600 miles per hour or more. Saturn’s South Pole hosts a 5000 mile-diameter hurricane-like tempest with a true eye wall that is unique in our solar system.In 1979 the Voyager spacecraft transmitted photos of a perfect hexagon over Saturn’s North Pole; in October 2006 the Cassini spacecraft found it there still. This polygon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex (which is circular), but Saturn’s is big enough to fit four Earths inside, and is 60 miles deep. A cloud has been circling inside it at 200 mph (100 meters per second) since at least the last twenty years. Never elsewhere in the universe has such a configuration been seen.Of Saturn’s 48 named moons, Titan, our solar system’s biggest moon, has been partly explored. It looks much like earth, and is our solar system’s sole moon that like earth has an extended atmosphere, though since Titan is ten times more massive than Earth, its atmosphere is rather thicker than ours. Giant geysers erupt hundreds of miles into the air on the 300-mile-wide moon Enceladus, the solar system’s whitest object.All this singularity associated with but one planet, denizen of a run-of-the-mill planetary system that circles a mid-range star in a mid-sized galaxy. The 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe each contain on average about 100 billion stars, meaning that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all of earth’s beaches. Wow! Save all your chat conversations. Find them online. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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