Measuring Saturn’s Speedy Rotation

How do we measure the rotation speed of a planet? Exactly as you would expect.  Watch the surface, look for markable features, and time how long it takes until those features pass the same point again in the future.  But how can we possibly nail down this information when the planet has little to no visible surface features.  Gas giant planets are great examples of this.  Jupiter is a bit easier since it has plenty of storms and separated cloud layers along the planet’s rotation axis, but the other three are much tougher.  Aside from hard-to-spot features, gas giants also...

Storms seen on Uranus!

The seventh planet from the Sun is a boring one.  The best photos we have of Uranus were obtained in January 1986 during the passing of Voyager 2, and they revealed a cold, pale-green, ball of Methane four times the diameter of Earth with very little visible activity. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about Uranus, and it’s far more interesting than we thought.  It has rings, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons.  It has a 98 degree axial tilt, meaning that the poles of the planet cycle through 42 years of sunlight and 42 years of darkness during it’s 84...