Science / Medicine : Hubble to View Huge Saturn Storm

The space agency is preparing to use the Hubble Space Telescope to observe a celestial spectacle: a gargantuan storm on Saturn that is 1 1/2 times wider than the Earth.

“It’s creating a lot of excitement. As soon as the space telescope people heard about it, they wanted to point the telescope at it,” said Daniel Green of the International Astronomical Union’s Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, a reporting agency for discoveries in space. The bureau notified Hubble scientists about the storm.

The oval-shaped white spot on the solar system’s second-largest planet is growing, and now measures 12,500 miles wide by 3,100 miles long, New Mexico State University astronomer Reta Beebe said last week. By comparison, Earth has a diameter of about 7,900 miles.

Beebe said Saturn’s new storm has formed a disturbance that includes two smaller white spots. The disturbance stretches 50,000 miles east to west--about one-fifth of the way around the equatorial region of the ringed planet--and 3,100 miles north to south, she added.

Such storms appear on Saturn roughly once every 30 Earth years--the length of a single year on Saturn. They are probably created by a sudden upwelling of Saturn’s internal heat that carries ammonia gas high into the planet’s atmosphere, where it freezes into white crystals of ammonia ice, Beebe said.