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Technology Lifestyle Saturn’s rings smudged by greased lightning?
Technology Lifestyle Saturn’s rings smudged by greased lightning? | Saturn’s rings smudged by greased lightning? |
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| Written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 27 November 2006 | |
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Nature Magazine reports that the idea was proposed by Geraint Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. They say that “If the theory is right, these faint features are the signature of awesome events: lightning strokes ten thousand times more energetic than those on Earth, releasing beams of electrons that surge up from Saturn's surface to whack into the rings and blast out jets of electrically charged dust”. As for the smudges being the result of meteor strikes, John says that: ""It's implausible that several meteorites would strike the rings in the same place in close succession." No-one has yet seen the types of storms on Saturn, so the reports are very speculative. But the idea of massive electron beams rising from the planet’s surface is very reminiscent of science fiction novels and would be truly amazing to see. Unfortunately no-one at NASA or Nature was able to confirm our own off-the-cuff theory that John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are responsible for generating Saturn’s intriguingly mysterious ‘greased lightning’. {moscomment}
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