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

[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

[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.

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

[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: 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?

5 billion years ago?

[Ogre332]

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

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.

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.