Superstorm 14 oktober 2008 sciencenow.org

Move over, Ike. A hurricane hundreds of times more powerful than its largest terrestrial nephew and with an inner eye 4000 kilometers across whirls above the south pole of Saturn in this infrared photo snapped by NASA's Cassini spacecraft and released on 13 October. The walls of the eye tower over fifty kilometers above the planet's warm interior, and wind speeds reach 500 kilometers per hour. At the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Ithaca, New York, Cassini scientists also revealed similar images of Saturn's north pole. Astronomers are still puzzled as to why Saturn has big polar vortices but Jupiter does not, even though the two planets are comparable in size and internal structure.

© Govert Schilling