Scientists with NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission have been tracking the visibly bright, lightning-generating storm--the longest continually observed electrical storm ever monitored by Cassini.
|
| ©NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute |
| It is no Great Red Spot, but these two side-by-side views show the longest-lived electrical storm yet observed on Saturn by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The view at left was created by combining images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters, and shows Saturn in colors that approximate what the human eye would see. The storm stands out with greater clarity in the sharpened, enhanced color view at right. |
Saturn's electrical storms resemble terrestrial thunderstorms, but on a much larger scale. Storms on Saturn have diameters of several thousand kilometers (thousands of miles), and radio signals produced by their lightning are thousands of times more powerful than those produced by terrestrial thunderstorms.
Comment: There are other things that sounds like a crack of thunder (although the article says "crack of lightning" and starts fires. A cometary fragment. The fire investigators have not yet confirmed what did start the fire, but one has to wonder if they will even think about a cometary fragment at all since we have been conditioned NOT to think of this likely scenario.
As we saw in Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow comets can start lots of fires.
Hmmmm. And investigators never seem to go with this line of thought. Instead they blame the fires on lightning and farmers burning fields; always steering us away from comets - even when fireballs have been reported.
It would almost seem as if someone is trying to hide something.