The Mystery of Saturn's Atmosphere

eldavojohn writes "Scientists are being forced to rethink theories on why Saturn's upper atmospheric temperature is hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight. 'This unexplained "energy crisis" represents a major gap in our understanding of these planets' atmospheres,' the scientists write. 'We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating.'"

Comments

Mandatory GW

[Oligonicella]

"...a major gap in our understanding of these planets' atmospheres..."

But, we understand ours .

Re: Mandatory GW

[Black Parrot]

> But, we understand ours .

If you read the article you'll find that "these planets" refers to the gas giants. It's a specific phenomenon with as-yet unknown causes, not a general problem with understanding atmospheres.

Re:Mandatory GW

[DarkSideofOZ]

Actually, we STILL do not fully understand ours as of yet.

Besides, the high tempuratures on Saturn can be explained easily, Star Jones unleashed massive anal born methane attacks on the planet while doing non-stop Barrel Rolls fueled by the only food that could survive the long trip or a nuclear winter, Twinkies.

Re:Mandatory GW

[delt0r]

I would aggree with you.

In fact I would go one step further, and predict that once we understand our atmosphere we will be able to show that we can never predict events of that atmosphere. Chaos and all that. So to double the predive accuracy or time length you need exponetially more data. I predict that even with ultra addvanced mesurement methods and supercomputers we still won't have a good weather forcast past 1 month.

I still wonder why so many put so much faith in our gloabal warming prediction when our ablity to predict anything is rather poor. Especially the weather.

Unlike modding on /. which is a truly stochastic process with no hidden varables. ;)

Re:Mandatory GW

[PietjeJantje]

99 out of 100 scientists and everybody outside the USA think otherwise. I'm sure it's conspiracy, so I'm awaiting your scientific evidence that will make you that 1 guy that puts it all right.

"I still wonder why so many put so much faith in our gloabal warming prediction when our ablity to predict anything is rather poor."

Not only prediction, the prediction is the result of historical fact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Note that such an increase in temperature in such a small period of time has nothing to do with our understanding of Ice Ages, the athmosphere of gas giants, the effects of year-long oil industry propaganda and campaign funding, or the weather forecast on Fox.

Re:Mandatory GW

[bricko]

So, will someone actually say we dont know ka-ka about what is going on...and move on. Or as someone stated below...is it all the Saturn SUV's that is causing this....

Re: Mandatory GW

[tassii]

There are winds moving at 1000 mph and it doesn't occur to anyone that there might be some friction generating heat?

Re:Mandatory GW

[Woundweavr]

How about
-Previous predictions regarding global temperature and glacial melting have come true.
-Complete and full understanding is not necessary to make general large-scale predictions. Newton didn't understand Relativity but that doesn't mean he couldn't predict where the apple was going. A complete understanding of the human genome is not necessary to associate missing chromosomes with major problems.
-The underlying science of global warming does not require complex interactions. More CO2= more heat retained. The fundamental science isn't extremely complex and the evidence is overwhelming.

Re:Mandatory GW

[delt0r]

-The underlying science of global warming does not require complex interactions. More CO2= more heat retained. The fundamental science isn't extremely complex and the evidence is overwhelming. The question is how much will it warm. Now its a complicated question. Infact one we can't answer with any proper relaiblity. Global warming is not what i dispute. Its the cause that I question. In fact its the confidance of the cause by the media and ./ers that i question. Sure some scientist think its probable that it our contrabution to CO2. But thats a long way from evidance or proof.

Its interesting that you bring up newton. A 3 body system is in fact chaotic. We have good tools but the predictive power of obital mechanics falls in the same catagory. Fluid dynamics that governs the oceans (poorly understood and the dominate driver of long term climate) and the atmosphere are derived pulely from netwon laws of motion (ok a little thermodynamics as well).

Really this is a dam hard problem. Some of the claims are just to precise to be creidable. When you read the original source you find that things really arn't as simple or as certine as they "popular" versions claims.

Re: Mandatory GW

[ultranova]

There are winds moving at 1000 mph and it doesn't occur to anyone that there might be some friction generating heat?

Since winds are usually caused by heat differences in various parts of atmosphere, the question remains: where does the heat come from ?

Re: Mandatory GW

[tassii]

Wind is mostly caused by pressure differentials... air rushing from high pressure to low pressure. While heat is one reason for a pressure differential, its not the only reason.

Re:Mandatory GW

[An Onerous Coward]

You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.

You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.

You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.

Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.

You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.

In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.

Re: Mandatory GW

[DiamondGeezer]

What are the others?

Re:Mandatory GW

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

It is easier when you can acquire data any time you wnat and drill for geological records going back thousands of years.

Re:Mandatory GW

[cluelessTypeOfGuy]

Am I missing something, or is this not supposed to be "insightful"?

Re:Mandatory GW

[cnettel]

The fact that a 3 body system is chaotic doesn't mean that the mass will suddenly annihilate or change its total mass/energy. The exact positions might be unknown, but not being able to time-step doesn't mean that you can't say useful things about the end result. I can say that we'll all be dead in 200 years with what's probably pretty good accuracy, while not being able to account for our future lives in any detail at all.

Re: Mandatory GW

[nebbian]

I went to the thunderbolts site, however it doesn't seem to contain an explanation of the "Plasma Universe". Maybe it's there, but if so then surely you should have deep linked to the explanation?

Clip clop clip clop what's that under the bridge, Mr. Billy Goat Gruff?

I smell a troll.

Re: Mandatory GW

[TapeCutter]

"A busted theory is one that doesn't match reality."

I couldn't agree more. "The electric universe" has been busted, changing it's name to "the plasma universe" won't help.

Re:Mandatory GW

[rbanffy]

I wonder what catagory of spell checker you use. Its relaiblity is a major contrabution to the quality of your text. Must be a dam good one.

Re: Mandatory GW

[Dabido]

That friction might be from a big black monolith thingy. I saw one orbiting Jupiter. :-)

Re: Mandatory GW

[Anonymous Coward]

That's definitely a hot, and possibly wet, reason.

Re:Mandatory GW

[delt0r]

First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided What media is that! The popular "media" I see and read is about as one sided as you can get.

In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming Talk to some and find out. Pop in to the nearset conference on the issue (if you are in the US they are very expensive however). Count me as a gloabal warming beliver and "humans are the Cause" doubter. Even better read some of the papers already published in peer rewived jornals. Its not as clear cut as it seems.

You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change. And in your opinion what does some who can get a paper out sound like? I have only 3 papers published in peer reviewed jornals and 1 book chapter that was also peer reviewed. But the postdoc sould bump that up.

Re:Mandatory GW

[delt0r]

Unfortunatly the climate prediction does not lend itself to such easy predictions. There will be a ice age in the future. There will be warm periods inbetween. But what we are trying to do is say that it will warm buy 2 deg by 2100 and that we casued 80% of that warming from CO2. Thats quite a specific statement.

Re:Mandatory GW

[delt0r]

Aspell and my Wife. MS word can't get close to the word I'm atempting to spell, niether can OO. My spellchecker plugins don't seem to work. You'll get over it.

When I started to use a spellchecker on my email, a few of my workmates asked me to turn it off. Becasue they liked to have a laugh about my spelling.

Re:Mandatory GW

[An Onerous Coward]

>>> First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided

>> What media is that! The popular "media" I see and read is about as one sided as you can get.

You're right, the two of us do seem to be getting our news from completely different sources. The media I read is more than happy to bring up the views of climate skeptics like Fred Singer and Willie Soon, and their bought-and-paid-for-by-Exxon advocacy groups like the George C. Marshall Institute, CATO, and the Heritage Foundation.

>>> In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming

>> Talk to some and find out. Pop in to the nearset conference on the issue (if you are in the US they are very expensive however). Count me as a gloabal warming beliver and "humans are the Cause" doubter. Even better read some of the papers already published in peer rewived jornals. Its not as clear cut as it seems.

Personally, I don't have access to enough data points to convince myself one way or another. I'd like to see an objective poll (read: not funded by the Heritage Foundation) comparing and contrasting opinions from three groups: the overall population, people with a Masters or higher in any scientific discipline, and active climate researchers. My suspicion is that, the more familiar people are with the material, the more accepting they are of anthropogenic global warming.

My reason for this: When climate skeptics cite their own expert witnesses and papers, they usually cite non-peer-reviewed material and experts in marginally related fields like astrophysics, geology, physics, engineering, etc. When you hear of letters and statements signed by "thousands of scientists skeptical of climate change", you see the same pattern: almost none of the signers have strong credentials in the most relevant fields.

>>> You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.

>> And in your opinion what does some who can get a paper out sound like? I have only 3 papers published in peer reviewed jornals and 1 book chapter that was also peer reviewed. But the postdoc sould bump that up.

My concern is that it doesn't sound like you have a very deep grasp of the chaos theory that you frequently rely on in your responses. As I mentioned earlier, you freely conflate weather models and climate models, which is understandable for a layman, but completely unforgivable for a climate scientist. Certainly, there is some overlap and interaction between the two types of models, but it's perfectly possible to be unable to create an accurate 30 day weather forecast, and yet able to create an accurate 30 year climate forecast.

I would be lying shamelessly if I said I was any sort of chaos theory expert myself. I'm just going with my own best understanding.

Out of curiosity, what is your PhD in, and what were the subjects of the three papers you've published?

Re:Mandatory GW

[rbanffy]

:-) OK. I give up.

Too darn hot

[sporkme]

Easy. It must be all the SUV's.

The corona of the sun is hotter than the surface or the core. Maybe they can examine the energies at work in the stellar phenomenon, as the gas giants are often referred to as "failed stars."

Re:Too darn hot

[sporkme]

--Wait. Hotter than the surface but not hotter than the core. The corona is one to three million degrees kelvin, the surface is around 5800 degrees, and the core is around 13 million degrees.

Re:Too darn hot

[BadEvilYoda]

But the sun (and other stars) have more mass than Jupiter and Saturn - that's why the pressure at the core was great enough to start nuclear fusion and "start" the sun at some point 5 billion years ago. Saturn and Jupiter, while they have hot cores under immense pressure and temperature (along with immense gravity), don't have high enough pressure (not enough mass) to kick the tires and start the fusion. So it may not be the same energy or processes at work, as fusion releases WAY more energy than just pressure and rotation alone. /"My God, it's full of stars" - Obligatory.

Re:Too darn hot

[rumith]

Particles in solar corona are accelerated by the magnetic field, and the process is more or less well modeled by now; gas giants do not possess that strong magnetic fields. One should note that it's the particles that originate in the core in fusion reactions and are emitted away; however, there are no fusion reactions in the cores of gas giants AFAIK, so we're talking about quasi stationary processes in the atmosphere. This difference is fundamental, and the analogy seems broken to me.

Re:Too darn hot

[Hawthorne01]

Didn't you read Slashdot yesterday? It's the dinosaur's fault!

Re:Too darn hot

[Iwanowitch]

Sorry to be pedantic here, but there is no such thing as 'degree kelvin'. 10 degrees Celsius = 50 degrees Fahrenheit = 283.15 Kelvin. It's minor, but important to know in some circles.

Re:Too darn hot

[rbanffy]

Dear Coward,

Showing proper knowledge is important for your argument to be considered. I reserve the right to consider anyone who doesn't know "Kelvin" is a unit as not properly educated and, therefore, under-qualified to make comments on Physics.

With so many incompetent people making such bold statements about Climatology, there is little time to be wasted with what can only be considered as layman ramblings.

Would you consider someone who doesn't know Mexican is not a language or who doesn't know when a fiscal year ends or that Pakistan is not an Arab country to be fit for Presidency?

Oh... Wait...

Re:Too darn hot

[StikyPad]

Sorry to be pedantic here, but kelvin is not capitalized, only its symbol, K. It's minor, but important to know in some circles.

Re: If memory serves correctly

[Black Parrot]

> Fisty Prost has a direct relation to weather patterns on celestial bodies.

No, you're thinking of frosty pist.

My hypothesis...

[Black Parrot]

The Saturnians haven't invented Slashdot technology yet, so all their bull sessions generate high-energy hot air rather than low energy moderation packets.

Re:Its all our fault

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly sure how things like greenhouse gases filter into this problem. Saturn has a cloudtop temperature of about 90K which means that it isn't going to be emitting much heat by Stefan's law which depends on the fourth power of temperature. But then again, Saturn only receives about 1% of the sunlight intensity that we get so it is not light we are shining a bright flashlight on an icecube--it is more like we are shining an extremely dim flashlight on an icecube which amplifies the importance of changes in things like greenhouse gases and emissivity.

One of the things that we can't ignore is the affect of spontaneous radioactive decay. If Saturn is just a ball of gas then it probably won't have very many heavy elements that can decay over time (heavy supernova remnants with half-lives in the billions of years like uranium). But if Saturn has a large hidden rocky core then it is certainly reasonable for it to have significant heat generation which would be insulated by the gases. Of course this is well known since it is what keeps the Earth warm (with the crust to insulate it from space).

Re:"energy crisis"

[maxume]

If you study gas giants and you find out that your models don't match observations, it isn't that extreme to call it a crisis.

Space Is The Place

[ettlz]

So is this the real reason why Sun Ra came to Earth?

Re:Space Is The Place

[MechaShiva]

Flamebait? If I had mod points, I'd help you out more directly.

If nothing else, maybe this'll help. Nuclear war truly is a mother fucker.

Re:Space Is The Place

[ettlz]

Flamebait?

Yeah, I didn't realise just how many Saturnian members of the Angel race hung out around here.

Re:Saturn is a gas giant

[Goaway]

Oh wow, convection! Thanks for pointing that out, I'm sure no planetary scientist had ever thought of that before!

5 billion years ago?

[Ogre332]

How can the sun be 5 billion years old when the universe is only 6000 years old?

Re:5 billion years ago?

[Seto89]

You are working in different units. 6000 god years is about 12 900 000 000 Sun years, which is not that different from the values we predict from the speed of the expansion of the Universe.
Religion is not wrong, it's just using different meanings of words and God's special units (GSU) rather than SI units.

Re:5 billion years ago?

[cakefool]

god reuses parts, like you do with HD's and RAM.

Friction

[faqmaster]

It's friction from all the wind.

Re:"energy crisis"

[Cromac]

It's probably a crisis to academics who are convinced they're never wrong and have the answers to all of the universes mysteries.

Oh noes!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Photino birds!

Re:the mystery of man'kind' committing life0cide

[FooAtWFU]

I really can't tell whether this guy is serious, or if he's secretly an 3v17 capitalist pretending to be an incomprehensible environmentalist so as to discredit his political opponents' positions.

Atmosphere warming?

[albertost]

ask Al Gore!

Chemical reactions

[foniksonik]

Seems like some simple calculations of what types of chemical reactions may be taking place in there, based on our knowledge of constituent elements that make up the atmosphere, could be made and levels of energy resulting could be inferred. I don't imagine there's some mystery heat engine there... just some extra chemical activity that hasn't been accounted for.

Re:Chemical reactions

[radtea]

I don't imagine there's some mystery heat engine there... just some extra chemical activity that hasn't been accounted for.

Planetary chemical reactions generally run to completion on relatively short timescales compared to the age of the solar system. For example, if Earth were deprived of life there would be no free oxygen left in its atmosphere after a million years or so due to weathering.

Giant planets are mostly hydrogen and helium, so there isn't a lot to work with chemically. There have been suggestions that ongoing fractionation of gases, with the helium sinking to the bottom and thereby releasing its gravitational potential energy, might be a source of the giant planet's excess heat. But even that explanation is a bit marginal, as the lifetime for such fractionation is comparable to the age of the solar system.

See!!!

[element-o.p.]

Global warming *isn't* our fault after all!!!

Re:Its all our fault

[paj1234]

Thanks for your interesting post AC. However I could not help noticing that you should have written "the effect of spontaneous radioactive decay" not "affect". Generally speaking, when you affect something, you produce an effect upon it. http://www.englishforums.com/English/AffectEffect/ vdk/Post.htm

Wikipedia, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't anyone recall the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism? It's like people just suddenly forgot it existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin-Helmholtz_mech anism

You'll also find links to it from the Wikipedia pages on Jupiter and, you guessed it, Saturn.

Sheesh.

An easy answer...

[mtec]

Examine Julia Roberts in her prime, now there's something that was hotter than can be explained. I mean, just look at any one part of her and you think... meh. But pull the camera back, take her all in at once and boom! - more hotness than can be explained! Once they figure out Julia - mystery's over.

Re:An easy answer...

[Xyrus]

Julia Roberts was never covered in hot corn nuts. Therefore she will never be hotter than Mila Jovivich covered in hot corn nuts.

~X~

I know

[Tablizer]

It's all those ring tourists from Andromeda. Sucks having a pretty planet in yur solar system.

Gravitational Contraction

[Anonymous Coward]

One source of energy in addition to the sun is the gravitational potential energy of the material of the planet itself. As more massive substances fall deeper into the planet, potential energy is turned into heat energy.

Exactly how this energy gets into the upper atmosphere is an interesting question, but it isn't as much of a mystery as the article tries to make it out to be.

Gravity Rules, EM Drools!

[s388]

"the EM force rules the universe and all of the data coming back backs up the assertions of the Thunderbolts crew. The Einstein Special Relativity crowd who thinks gravity rules are just wrong. Sorry but they are. Special Relativity is a busted theory and it doesn't answer issues like the atmosphere temperature on Saturn."

Special Relativity also doesn't explain the price of tea in China either, but I've never heard that cited as a disadvantage.

I've also never heard any "relativity crowd" claiming that "gravity RULES" or that "EM drools" or any other similar nonsense that you just made up. I'm not a physicist and even I know that gravity is extremely weak relatively, no pun intended, and would never explain-- and isn't supposed to explain-- the vast majority of phenomena in the universe. You know, like sub-atomic ones, or the thermal mechanics of every atmosphere (let alone a single one), or good web design.

You're looking for "true scientific types" and "some seriously good science" to swoop in and justify or expand on what you've claimed, but you don't seem to be a practitioner yourself.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/synopsis2.htm

Practically every passage of that page is problematic at best and absurd at worst. It's the kind of thing that's so foolish it makes you do a confused a tap-dance just to address the tangled web of stupidity. Here I go anyway: evidently no one pointed out that a force-like phenomenon keeps us attached to the earth-- we don't float away-- with no electricity or magnetism involved. And that when we formalize the relationship between people/cannonballs, the same principles (OF GRAVITY) easily and uncontroversially explain many cosmic phenomenon whose parts are billions of times more massive than people and even than our planet.

"Close approaches of planets led to powerful electric arcing between planets and moons. All rocky bodies in the solar system show the massive scars of these kinds of electrical events."

Interplanetary electric arcs? Come on.

Re:Gravity Rules, EM Drools!

[sbohmann]

Wait a minute.

It is true that electron clouds form pretty much all of the visible universe, in so far as whatever we see, we do so as an effect of electron-electron interactions carried out by photons.

The solidity of solid ojects is due to electricity, too.

Mass and gravity are more or less the only non-electrical features things expose to us in everyday life.

Of course, in the cosmic scale, electric interactions rarely occur, due to the fact that planets and stuff, massive as they are, do not carry huge charges with them. (Or else our hair would be always standing straight up)

Re:Gravity Rules, EM Drools!

[s388]

Yeah, granted. Maybe I wasn't clear about "EM drools." I didn't mean that EM was negligible or contemptible in the slightest-- just aping the (opposite) caricature of the parent.

Re:Its all our fault

[khallow]

As I recall, there's significant contributions to the current heat of the Earth from the residual energy of formation (ie, all that junk colliding generates heat much which is still present) and tidal forces of the Moon and Sun.

Wait....

[argStyopa]

"We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating"

Pish-tosh. I watched An Inconvenient Truth and am certain that we already know everything there is to know about atmospheric science.

Or is it?

[The Monster]

someone who doesn't know Mexican is not a language

You might find a lot of Spaniards who don't know that, just as you'd find a pretty good number of English who think that American qualifies as a foreign language.

Warmer? Less cold?

[StikyPad]

Scientists are being forced to rethink theories on why Saturn's upper atmospheric temperature is hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight.

While technically correct, using "hot/hotter" to describe -185C just seems wrong. Sure it's 88K over absolute 0, but still well below the freezing point of people, let alone their perception of hot.