The Strongest Jet Ever Detected and a New Thermal Wave in Saturn's Equatorial Stratosphere

Details The Strongest Jet Ever Detected and a New Thermal Wave in Saturn's Equatorial Stratosphere The Strongest Jet Ever Detected and a New Thermal Wave in Saturn's Equatorial Stratosphere

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.5306l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #53.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.495

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The strongest stratospheric jet yet detected, with a speed between 500 and 600 m/s, has been discovered in the equatorial region of Saturn by combining the nadir and limb observations of Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) aboard the Cassini spacecraft. A similar jet was discovered on Jupiter. These discoveries raise the possibility that intense jets are common in the equatorial stratospheres of giant planets. The jet's velocity is steady during the observational period (March, 2005 to January, 2008), but variations over a longer time-scale are possible and may be associated with the semi-annual oscillations of Saturn’s low-latitude stratospheric temperatures. An equatorial wave with wavenumber 9 is revealed in the stratosphere of Saturn by the CIRS high spatial-resolution thermal maps. The equatorial wave has a westward phase velocity of 10-110 m/s relative to the background current, indicating that it is an equatorial Rossby wave. The discovery of an equatorial wave in the stratosphere suggests that Saturn's equatorial oscillations may be driven by vertically propagating waves, the same mechanism that drives the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) on Earth.

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