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10 Confounding Mysteries Of Our Solar System
By Alan Boyle, Lew Rockwell:
We’ve put men on the moon and car-sized robots on Mars. We’ve also discovered nearly 1,800 planets around other stars. It would be easy to think that we’ve got a pretty good handle on what’s out there. Then you find out that there’s a bizarre giant hexagon on Saturn, and you realize that we don’t understand half of what’s going on with our closest neighbors. These mysteries make it clear we’re going to need a lot more robots.
10 The Venus Vortex
A giant vortex near the Venus’s south pole behaves like a storm but without rain or lightning. It’s about 1,800 kilometers (1,200 mi) across, 18 kilometers (12 mi) tall, and takes place 41 kilometers (26 mi) above the planet’s surface. We used to think it was an oval, but in 2011, scientists discovered it regularly changes shape. Sometimes it looks like an “S” or an “8,” but often, it’s just an irregular blob. It’s about three degrees off from the south pole, which it orbits every 5 to 10 days.
