Diamond rain and methane fog? Bring an umbrella!
From pounding winter storms to relentless droughts to ever more ferocious hurricanes, it's easy to curse our planet's increasingly deadly weather. But for a little perspective, check out conditions beyond our own atmosphere.The Methane Fog of Titan
It's always London at its worst on this icy moon of Saturn, the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere. Multiple flybys by the Cassini orbiter have failed to visually penetrate the methane fog, but have revealed detail (via the orbiter's powerful Composite Infrared Spectrometer) around the methane and ethane lakes dotting the planet. Titan's deadly atmosphere is laced with hydrocarbons (including propane, ethylene (the plastic used in one-gallon milk jugs), and propylene (another food-container plastic), produced when sunlight interacts with the methane; these seem to condense, fall as rain, and evaporate again in a deadly version of Earth's own water cycle. In fact, Titan is thought to be similar to Earth conditions before oxygen became plentiful — though its "spring rains" last 30 Earth years.
Jupiter's SuperMegaUltrastorm
NASA
Superstorm Sandy was big, covering half the continental United States. But Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm as wide as three Earths, is the solar system's go-to for megastorms. The giant anticyclone may have been swirling since before Newton published his calculus, and can be definitively traced to at least the 1800s. The spacecraft Galileo clocked winds in the gas giant's iconic spot at over 400 mph – halfway to Mach 1 and far faster than any wind recorded on Earth — so bring a sturdy umbrella. It's unknown why this storm has lasted so long, but we hope to find answers with a deeper probe into Jupiter's atmosphere when the spacecraft Juno arrives in 2016.The Diamond Rain of Saturn
NASA
Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn may experience helium rain; simulations by scientists at UC Berkeley suggest that under immense pressure, somewhere around 7,000 miles below the tops of Jupiter's clouds, helium and dissolved neon drop out of the sky to mix with metallic hydrogen below. On Saturn, lightning bolts separate carbon from hydrogen in the atmosphere, freeing them to find fellow carbon atoms and compress into graphite and then diamond, which falls as the solar system's most expensive rain. Electrical storms can be 10,000 times as powerful as those on Earth, last for months at a time, and cover unthinkably vast areas. (One such 2011 storm would have shrouded the entire Earth eight times over.)...MORE
HT: True Economics
