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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.'"
--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.
FairTax baby!
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.
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).