Feature
THE VIOLENT POLAR VORTEX
Around once every Saturn year (roughly 30 Earth years), huge, storms work their way through the clouds of the northern hemisphere. The storm pictured here, which was imaged in 2011, is the longest storm to date, lasting roughly 200 days
On the outside, Saturn almost looks like a calm, bland world, but once in a while, huge storms flare up on the ringed planet. From the short-lived Great White Spot of 1990 to the more recent storm of 2010, which grew into an atmospheric belt covering around 4 billion square kilometres (1.5 billion square miles), Saturn has proven to be a turbulent world. What’s more, the storms on Saturn are the second fastest in the Solar System, after ice giant Neptune, peaking at an impressive 1,800 kilometres per hour (1,120 miles per hour) and blowing in an easterly direction.