M.J. Rose

I think after all the ghouls, we need a little colorful magic from the cosmos to help steel ourselves for next Tuesday –

From The Daily Good,

Saturn’s North Pole Just Changed Color And Nobody Knows Why
by Kate Ryan

“Just when you thought our planet had enough doomsday problems to grapple with, Saturn went ahead and changed colors on us. Specifically, Saturn’s north pole—a hexagonal vortex that Gizmodo claims could swallow our planet whole. While no one knows for certain how Saturn’s north pole came to be this way, scientists have been tracking its shifting hue thanks to the Cassini Imaging Team, a probe that has been circling the planet since 2004.

Based on images beamed back from Cassini, the hexagonal pole was blue back in 2012; since then it’s progressed into bright gold. Based on the images, which were released by the Cassini Imaging Team last week, scientists theorize that accumulating haze particles could be sparking this startling change. While it may seem bizarre for a vast swath of a planet to change colors so rapidly, there was a time between 1995 and 2009 when Saturn’s north pole grew increasingly dark. This, scientists deduced, was a result of diminishing photochemical reactions (i.e., less sunlight reached the planet to react with the atmosphere’s molecular components).

Now that the northern pole is tipping back toward the sun, increasing amounts of light are igniting more of these photochemical reactions, and in turn, producing more bright gold haze. As NASA put it in a statement released on Friday…”

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