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Read moreJupiter’s 400 Year Storm – Voyager 1 NASA
Severe solar flares, space storms and solar wind can disrupt satellites, GPS, power grids and radio communications.
Space weather forecasts, running all day, every day from spring 2014, will allow government and businesses to take swift action to ensure services are maintained.
Space weather forecasts to protect vital technologies from solar storms – GOV.UK
Read more "Space weather forecasts to protect vital technologies from solar storms – GOV.UK"
For the uninitiated, Saturn’s uncannily symmetric cloud system measures roughly 20,000-miles across, and is utterly unique in our solar system. Its dimensions and dynamics are just bizarre. At the hexagon’s center whirls a tightly wound hurricane roughly fifty-times larger than the average hurricane-eye on Earth. About it spins an assortment of smaller vortices, caught up in the hexagon’s jet stream, that rotate clockwise, even as the central hurricane, and the outer hexagon, rotate in the opposite direction. These smaller storms are visible in the image above as reddish ovals. The largest of the smaller vortices, appearing white in the lower right corner of the hexagon, spans about 2,200 miles – roughly twice the size of Earth’s largest hurricanes. (via New Hi-Res Footage Shows Saturn’s Mysterious Hexagon Like Never Before)
Read moreRead more“We found a graveyard of comets”, exclaims Professor Ferrín.
He adds:
“Imagine all these asteroids going around the Sun for aeons, with no hint of activity. We have found that some of these are not dead rocks after all, but are dormant comets that may yet come back to life if the energy that they receive from the Sun increases by a few per cent.“Surprisingly, this can happy fairly easily, as the orbits of many objects in the asteroid belt are nudged by the gravity of Jupiter. The shape of their orbits can then change, leading to a decrease in the minimum distance between the object and the Sun (perihelion) and a slight increase in average temperature.