Monster Saturn electrical storm longest on record

BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhuanet) -- The longest running
electrical storm on Saturn recorded byscientists is creating lightning
bolts 10,000 times more powerful than any seen on Earth.

The monster storm appeared in Saturn's southern
hemisphere five months ago, when it was first spotted by NASA's Cassini
spacecraft, and has persevered to become the planet's longest continuously
recorded tempest to date.

"We saw similar storms in 2004 and 2006 that each
lasted for nearly a month, but this storm is longer-lived by far," said Georg
Fischer, an associate with Cassini's radio and plasma wave science team at the
University of Iowa, Iowa City, in a statement. "And it appeared after nearly two
years during which we did not detect any electrical storm activity from Saturn."

Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument
first picked up signals from the storm's lightning bursts on Nov. 27, 2007, with
the probe's cameras catching their first visual glimpse on Dec. 6. Images of the
storm show it as a smudge on Saturn's otherwise creamy cloud bands.

Electrical storms on Saturn are similar to
thunderstorms on Earth, but much larger. They can span thousands of miles and
generate radio bursts from lightning that can be thousands of times more
powerful than Earthly lightning bolts, said mission scientists, who named a
massive lightning storm in 2004 "Dragon."

Researchers hope that by tracking the Saturnian
weather, they may gain new insights into the processes behind the planet's
lightning, as well as how it changes as the seasons shift from summer to autumn
in Saturn's southern hemisphere.

"In order to see the storm, the imaging cameras have
to be looking at the right place at the right time, and whenever our cameras see
the storm, the radio outbursts are there," said Ulyana Dyudina, a Cassini
imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
Calif.

Cassini's onboard instruments have tracked the storm
every 10 hours and 40 minutes, when Saturn's rotation brings it into view,
though amateur astronomers are also watching over the tempest from Earth.

(Agencies)