2016.11.15:土星の水彩画のような渦巻き

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オリジナル記事:Saturn’s ‘Watercolor’ Swirls

Saturn’s north polar region displays its beautiful bands and swirls, which somewhat resemble the brushwork in a watercolor painting.

土星の北極には美しい帯と渦巻きがあり、水彩画の筆跡に多少似ています。

Each latitudinal band represents air flowing at different speeds, and clouds at different heights, compared to neighboring bands. Where they meet and flow past each other, the bands’ interactions produce many eddies and swirls.

それぞれの緯度にある帯は隣同士の帯で比較すると、異なる速度の大気の流れと、異なる高さの雲であることが分かります。その帯同士がぶつかったり流れ過ぎる際の相互作用でたくさんの大小様々な渦を生じさせます。

The northern polar region of Saturn is dominated by the famous hexagon shape (see PIA11682) which itself circumscribes the northern polar vortex – seen as a dark spot at the planet’s pole in the above image – which is understood to the be eye of a hurricane-like storm (PIA14946).

土星の北極には有名な六角形(PIA11682参照)があって、それ自身が北極の巨大な渦でもあり、画像に見える土星の北極の暗点は、ハリケーンの中心の目のようにも見えます(PIA14946)。

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 5, 2016 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

この画像は、土星の環の面の約20°上方から、日の当たっている方向を見ています。この画像は、728ナノメートルにセットした近赤外光の波長のスペクトルフィルタを使用したカッシーニ搭載の降格カメラで、2016年9月5日に撮影されました。

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 890,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 53 miles (86 kilometers) per pixel.

撮影地点は、土星から約890,000マイル(140万km)の距離です。画像解像度は1ピクセルあたり53マイル(86キロメートル)です。

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Last Updated: Nov. 14, 2016
Editor: Tony Greicius

訳者注:

記事中で触れられている2つの画像はJPLに掲載されています。

PIA11682: Spring Reveals Saturn’s Hexagon Jet Stream

Image Credit:NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image Addition Date:2009-12-09

PIA14946: Enter the Vortex … in Psychedelic Color

Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Image Addition Date:2013-04-29

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