The Fascinating Beauty that is Saturn

Saturn is my favourite planet in the solar system by far! It's hard not to love it with the beautiful ring system that surrounds the planet and it's beautiful pale yellow colouring, but for me part of what I love about it is just how strange and fascinating the planet is! Seriously when I was reading up about what I wanted to share in this post it felt like I could go on forever just reading up about the different things about this planet.

Saturn during it's Equinox with it's largest moon Titan visible in the bottom left corner.

So to start, here are a couple nifty things about Saturn you may not have known about! Saturn is the 6th planet in the solar system and the second largest after Jupiter. It has an oval shape due to it's fast rotation causing the poles to collapse in giving it a larger equator region. It has the largest ring system in all of the solar system spanning from 7,000 KM above it's equatorial region to 80,000 km above it and is made mostly of ice and little bit of rock particles! Saturn has the second most moons behind Jupiter counting to around 63, some notable ones being Rhea, Encladius and the most famous Titan for being the only moon in the solar system to have a thick and dense atmosphere. Lastly, Saturn get's it's pale yellow hue from it having ammonia particles in it's upper atmosphere.

All that stuff above is fine and dandy, but here are some of the more fascinating parts about Saturn! For one, we actually don't know how long a day in Saturn really is and I will go into the various factor that attribute to this. Another is how it's North Pole is naturally formed  hexagon on it that is not present on it's southern pole. Lastly, it can have major storms that seemingly wrap around the entire plan, but only seem to crop up on rare instances.

So to start, why do we actually not know exactly how long a day on Saturn is? Well the main reason is the clouds move at a different speed then the actual planet's core does. Certain sections of Saturns cloud move and rotate around the planet at differing speeds due to the winds. Some moving more in line with what we estimate a rotation cycle is, while others may go faster or slower! That all said scientists then tried to go off the magnetosphere's rotation that was given by Voyagers passby in order to estimate how long the day was which was agreed upon as a good estimate on the rotation, until Cassini arrived. When Cassini arrived, it's measurements of how long it took the magnetosphere to rotate showed it was slower then Voyagers! It was later derrived that Encladius's geysers of water actually created a drag on the magnetosphere and slowed down it's rotation! That all said after measurements from 3 different space prodes the latest estimate that we still have for the length of a day on Saturn is around 10 hours 32 minutes and 35 seconds. With all that said it does help me lead into helping to explain why there is a hexagon on Saturn's north pole!

The hexagon on Saturn's north pole filmed by Cassini

So what's with this? Well after being stumped by it since Voyagers original reports of it there has been some explanations developed as to why this is, and it does relate back to the topic on the differing wind currents on the planet. One experiment done in a lab using water showed they were able to create something very similar when moving the water currents at differing speeds in the center and on the outside. That movement created 6 small vortexes outside of the large center one which gave it those almost corner like appearances. It's amazing to me how this is a naturally occurring phenomenon!

Speaking of naturally occurring phenomenon, the massive storms Saturn can have are another crazy natural occurrence on the planet, but don't occur often. In fact storms like the one shown below have only occurred 6 times in the last 160 years! So why is a storm that could easily cover our globe so rare when storms here happen all the time? Well the answer to that scientist believe has to do with what the planet is made of. You see the storms on Saturn are also composed of water like they are here, but because there is so much hydrogen and helium on Saturn it actually acts as a stopper to storms there. Why is that? Well here when water heats up and rises, it will eventually condense as it cools off and fall back down as rain. Now something similar does occur on Saturn, the water heats up and rises, but because it is much more heavier than hydrogen and helium it never rises high enough! So what actually causes it is when the upper atmosphere cools enough that it dips underneath that layer of water, but when it does so it does so at a impressively large rate creating these beautiful, frightening massive storms!

The Saturn super storm, this one wrapped completely around the planet.

Saturn is a fascinating planet of our solar system, and as we learn more about it, the more fascinating it becomes! I cannot wait to see what this planet shows us in the future as we continue to study it! However this is only one fascinating marvels of our solar system and as time goes I hope to share more of the wonders of our solar system to you!

I hope you all enjoyed it and please feel free to share with your friends and family and give this a like if you enjoyed it!

See you out there!

Comets, The Dirty Snowballs of Space

For a dirty space snowball, comets are pretty awesome and frightening things. Not only are they amazing to look at, but they are potentially responsible for seeding life on our planet, and also causing extinction as well. With all that said what exactly are comets?

So in short, a comet is a giant snowball made up mostly of ice, but also can contain rock, dusts and frozen gases (Like Carbon Monoxide, Ammonia and Methane) which help to create it's trail. Though among all that they may contain organic compounds, more specifically amino acids the building blocks of life! It get's even crazier in that a study in France has shown that these amino acids might actually be able to form in space when they recreated the conditions of space in a lab and exposed a comet to similar levels of ultra violet radiation that it would receive in space!

Comet Hale Bopp seen from Earth in 1997

Comets really are truly amazing! However like stated they can be dangerous, just look at the dinosaurs and their fate! Comets have very catastrophic potential if one where to collide with the planet. That said NASA and other space agencies are constantly monitoring the skies for ones that may be in a trajectory with Earth.There has been moments however were we have had close calls, there was a comet that had passed between Earth and the Moon and we did not even see it till it was past us! Scary thought isn't it? However with our neighbours Saturn and Jupiter keeping us safe, and people keeping an eye out for them, it is unlikely we will be met with a surprise!

But wait, what about the trail? The trail of a comet is cause by the surface being heated as it approaches the sun. You'd be surprised to know that space isn't as cold as we think it is around our sun. Space around our planet for example can get up to around 205oF, so that being said the trail is the comet beginning to melt as it approaches our sun. Now the one thing to remember though is it's trail does not show the direction it is going, but rather is traveling in the direction of the solar winds. It's much like someone with long hair walking, but the wind is blowing from behind them pushing their hair in front.

Comet McNaught's trail seen from 2007 as it passed Earth

Comets are beautiful and powerful forces of nature that roam into our solar system from the dark edges of it and give us these stunning moments of beauty, but the scars on the planet leave us a reminder of it's potentially darker sides!

Keep an eye on the sky and keep an eye out for future posts!

Why do Stars Twinkle?

So there are often times when I am out with friends and I see a planet in the sky and I point it out to them. I often get asked "Well, how can you tell that's a planet?" I usually respond with the fact that it doesn't flicker. So why is then that stars twinkle and planets don't?

Well the biggest reason that a star twinkles in the night sky is partly to do with just how far away it is. When you look at a star in the night sky with your eyes, it's about the size of a pinpoint, and when you look through a telescope it basically still is the size of a pinpoint! So why is that relevant? Well as you can see in the photo below the earth has quite a few layers of atmosphere around it that causes the light to distort and zigzag as it passes through them to your eye. The changes in thickness of the atmosphere and temperatures causes the light to greatly distort as passes through it, and depending on the angle that distortion can increase as it travels through it more!

The different layers of Earth's Atmosphere

So then why do planets appear as a solid light rather then flicking like a star? Well simply put a planet is much closer, so the source of light is much larger then a star. As the light of a planet arrives to our atmosphere it still does the same zigzag effect a star does, but because it is closer the effect cancels itself out due to it's size. So you get that beautiful solid disk of light in the sky because of it.

So long story short, stars twinkle because they are far away, and planets are solid because they are close.

I hope you all enjoyed this post and learned something! Please like and share it along if you enjoyed it.

IC 1101, The Largest Galaxy!

So I figured that if we are going to start to write about the Universe here, might as well start with something big right? Well I decided why not write about the largest Galaxy that we know of so far, IC 1101! IC 1101 gets it's name when it was accidentally classified as a nebula back in 1895. It is the 1,101st object classified in the Index Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters (Which is abbreviated as IC). It is classified as a Supergiant Elliptical to Lenticular Galaxy (This terminology I shall be reviewing in a later post), and it is the brighest Galaxy in it's cluster.

IC 1101 taken by Hubble June 1995 Photo Credit: NASA

IC 1101 was originally discovered by British Astronomer Frederick William Herschel the First in 1790 though was not classified until 1895 by John Louis Emil Dreyer whom, as stated before, miss-classified it as a Nebula! It was not until 1932 as telescopes improved that we started to actually notice that some of it's nebulous qualities were actually other Galaxies and as they studied it more they would eventually re-classify it rightfully as a Galaxy.

So how big is IC 1101? Well it's really difficult to give something so big a sense of scale, but I shall try my best. To start, our own Galaxy contains roughly 100-400 billion stars. Sounds like a lot doesn't it? IC 1101 contains an estimated 100 trillion stars! Shown below as well is a photo showing a size comparison of 4 different Galaxies, the smalled being our Milky Way galaxy, the largest being IC 1101.

Size comparison from Smallest to Largest: Milky Way, Andromeda, M87, IC 1101

Generally speaking though, Galaxies of this type tend to be older, and as such IC 1101 is one of the more older galaxies we know of our there. It's golden hue comes from the fact that many of the stars in the Galaxy are mineral rich and are older stars some being close to seven billion years older then our very own Sol. Also, like many elliptical and lenticular galaxies, it has exhausted much of it's stellar dust for star formation which helps to give it that formless shape you see in the photographs.

While there isn't a large amount of information on it, it is still a fascinating thing to read about and to see and I hope you enjoyed reading about it and looking at some of the photos. I encourage you to continue to dig up whatever it is you can find on IC 1101 and perhaps learn something about it that I may not have shared on this post! That all said though, keep your eyes peeled for the next post and I hope you enjoyed the read! Feel free to share and rate!