Giant planets articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Editorial |

    The geological similarities between icy and rocky worlds invite comparison and cross-fertilization of knowledge.

  • News & Views |

    Flotation of aerosols as a film on the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan may explain the lakes’ stillness, and could influence the atmospheric hydrocarbon cycle.

    • Isabelle Couturier-Tamburelli

  • Article |

    Organic aerosols that sediment from Titan’s atmosphere may float, form a film and damp waves on Titan’s seas, according to computations. This damping effect could explain the observed smoothness of Titan’s seas.

    • Daniel Cordier
    •  & Nathalie Carrasco

  • Commentary |

    After more than a decade exploring Saturn and its moons, the Cassini mission is in its closing act. Cassini's last year is an encore performance stuffed with science, including a final plunge into Saturn's atmosphere.

    • Scott G. Edgington
    •  & Linda J. Spilker

  • News & Views |

    Saturn's F ring is chaperoned on both sides by the tiny moons Prometheus and Pandora. Numerical simulations show that this celestial ballet can result from the collision of two aggregates that evolved out of Saturn's main rings.

    • Aurélien Crida

  • News & Views |

    Saturn's poles exhibit giant swirling cyclones, whereas Jupiter's poles may not. Simulations of giant planet atmospheres suggest that just the right balance of convective storm energy and poleward drift of cyclones may explain Saturn's vortices.

    • Leigh N. Fletcher

  • Letter |

    Strong vortices have been observed at Saturn’s poles. Simulations suggest that tropospheric polar flows on giant planets are driven by moist convection, and that, while vortices can develop on Saturn, similar cyclones are not expected on Jupiter.

    • Morgan E O’Neill
    • , Kerry A. Emanuel
    •  & Glenn R. Flierl

  • Editorial |

    Research on the Solar System's planets has moved beyond fly-by science. Long-term observations of planetary bodies can yield insights as the days, seasons and years pass.

  • Letter |

    In many planetary atmospheres, including that of Earth, the base of the stratosphere—the tropopause—occurs at an atmospheric pressure of 0.1 bar. A physically based model demonstrates that the pressure-dependence of transparency to infrared radiation leads to a common tropopause pressure that is probably applicable to many planetary bodies with thick atmospheres.

    • T. D. Robinson
    •  & D. C. Catling

  • Letter |

    Great White Spot—a rare planet-encircling storm—raged on Saturn in 2010–2011. Analyses of high-resolution spacecraft imagery and numerical modelling reveal a dynamic storm head powered by sustained convection in the zonal flow of Saturn’s atmosphere.

    • E. García-Melendo
    • , R. Hueso
    •  & J. F. Sanz-Requena

  • Letter |

    Saturn is brighter than expected for a gas giant of its age. Calculations of Saturn’s thermal evolution show that the presence of layered convection in Saturn’s interior—much like that observed in the Earth’s oceans—would have slowed the planet’s cooling and may explain Saturn’s anomalous luminosity.

    • Jérémy Leconte
    •  & Gilles Chabrier

  • Letter |

    The stability over time of the zonal jets on the giant planets has been debated. An analysis of observations from the Cassini spacecraft reveals an acceleration of wind velocities in Saturn’s high-altitude equatorial jet between 2004 and 2009, by 20 m s−1 at tropopause level and by 60 m s−1 in the stratosphere.

    • Liming Li
    • , Xun Jiang
    •  & Kevin H. Baines

Browse broader subjects

Browse Giant planets across other nature.com journals