A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) detailed the mysterious "hotspots" seen on Saturn's surface and the massive cyclones that fuel them.
Their work published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers examined intense windstorms previously observed on Saturn and suggested they are the result of the buildup of several fleeting thunderstorms.
"Before it was observed, we never considered the possibility of a cyclone on a pole," study lead author Morgan O'Neill, a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a news release. "Only recently did Cassini give us this huge wealth of observations that made it possible, and only recently have we had to think about why [polar cyclones] occur."
A former PhD student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), O'Neill and her team studied images NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured of Saturn's hotspots in 2008. To try and determine what the cause was behind these massive cyclones, the researchers created a model of Saturn's atmosphere.
According to the release, the team hypothesized that thunderstorms were contributing to the cyclones because Saturn cannot produce them the way the Earth does due to not having any oceans. They found the thunderstorms to be drawing powerful wind to Saturn's poles, ultimately creating the cyclones.
"The whole atmosphere is kind of being dragged by the planet as the planet rotates, so all this air has some ambient angular momentum," O'Neill said in the release. "If you converge a bunch of that air at the base of a thunderstorm, you're going to get a small cyclone.
"Each of these storms is beta-drifting a little bit before they sputter out and die.
"This mechanism means that little thunderstorms - fast, abundant, but not very strong thunderstorms - over a long period of time can actually accumulate so much angular momentum right on the pole, that you get a permanent, wildly strong cyclone."
