Monecky - Grandes Sonhos

This animation shows the fluttering aurorae that light up both of Saturn’s poles. Created by the interaction of the solar wind with the planet’s magnetic field, Saturn’s aurorae are analogous to the more familiar northern and southern light on Earth.

Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. Calçada)

The largest and most powerful hurricanes ever recorded on Earth spanned over 1,000 miles across with winds gusting up to around 200 mph. That’s wide enough to stretch across nearly all U.S. states east of Texas. But even that kind of storm is dwarfed by the Great Red Spot, a gigantic storm in Jupiter. There, gigantic means twice as wide as Earth.

With tumultuous winds peaking at about 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for the past 150 years—maybe even much longer than that. While people saw a big spot in Jupiter as early as they started stargazing through telescopes in the 1600s, it is still unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot is there and it’s been there for a while, but they still struggle to learn what causes its swirl of reddish hues.

Image credit: NASA/JPL 

Lunar Eclipse 2019

Image credit: Joseph Brimacombe