The Rain On Saturn Falls Mainly From Space

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have discovered that the source of water in Saturn's upper atmosphere is none other than the geysers erupting from its moon Enceladus. The geysers spew water into space, most of which is lost. A small amount, though, falls to Saturn... equivalent to only about 7.5 kilos/second over the entire planet (PDF). A typical rainfall on Earth is 42 trillion times heavier."

Comments

Re:Space

[nschubach]

Could you imagine if Earth's moon was the source of rainfall? What kind of mythology/traditions would we have come up with from that!?

Re:How much is this in superdome volumes?

[Fluffeh]

Not to polish and buff your already obvious self importance and ability to scoff at this article, but to someone like myself, who isn't really into the technical aspects or astronomy and the physics behind it - articles such as this one (and many others on that chaps site) a simple layman explanation of something cool that is happening, or freshly discovered is a great source of infotainment.
 
/. isn't purely about having technical papers. You could link me the paper that was obviously published somewhere on this, and I probably wouldn't understand all the technical astrophysics mumbo jumbo in it, nor would I have time to read what was probably a couple dozen pages at the very least.

So, for me, thank you for posting a brief article, from a source that I can read and understand - and most importantly - still think to myself how space and the universe around us is a wonderful thing that always has a wonderful surprise around the next corner waiting to be discovered.