Saturn hurricane is 12 times UK size

An enormous hurricane raging at
Saturn's north pole has an eye
2,000km (1,250mi) across - big
enough to cover the UK 12 times over.
The striking images of the storm were
snapped from a height of 420.000km
(260,000mi) by the Cassini spacecraft,
which arrived at Saturn in 2004.
They were captured in red and infrared
wavelengths and have been false-
coloured to show detail.
Scientists say the hurricane's winds reach
a staggering 150m/s (330mph).
But they do not know just how long the
storm has been brewing.
When Cassini first arrived, the north pole
was in darkness; it was winter in the
planet's 29-Earth-year annual cycle.
Now it has taken some of its first sunlit
images of the pole, which has not been
seen since the Voyager 2 craft last sent
pictures on its fly-by in 1981.
Andrew Ingersoll, a member of the
Cassini team based at the California
Institute of Technology in California, US,
said: "We did a double take when we saw
this vortex because it looks so much like a
hurricane on Earth."
"But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger
scale, and it is somehow getting by on the
small amounts of water vapour in Saturn's
hydrogen atmosphere."
The team believes the hurricane to be
"stuck" at the pole, forced northward by
winds in the same way hurricanes tend to
move north on Earth.
Cassini caught sight of an even larger
storm in 2006 - the first time a hurricane
had been seen on another planet.