(Lightning causes smudges in Saturn's rings)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-11/27/content_5395355.htm

Not commenting on whether or not the Chinese are the most trustworthy in terms of news reporting. However, it's been commented on elsewhere too.

I'll just sit back and watch this one from the sidelines. Nonetheless, with amusement.

Gee, lightning, who'd have guessed Saturn was electrically active? I mean just because it's got auroras at both poles, and joins Venus in the "anomalous polar vortex" club. Hmm, poles... Vortexes... Auroras... Electrical activity... Birkeland Currents... Sun...

Nah... Couldn't be. 'Cause electricity "does nothing" in space. Right? =oP

[ /sarcasm ]

Lightning or meteorite impacts have been proposed, but with meteorites being discounted, because they most likely would not continue to randomly hit the same place(s). So, lightning is perhaps the better explanation. As they said "on scales not seen on Earth."

Funny, that's what people said about my comments on Martian spiders (which I stand by), relating them to electrical Lichtenberg figures. The disparaging comments were simply on the order of "well, we don't see lightning that big on Earth, so it can't be possible!" (but apparently we now see lightning that big or bigger on/near Saturn, assuming it is confirmed in the near to mid-future).

If we see it there, we MUST reconsider assumptions elsewhere. Can we please move into the 21st century and acknowledge electricity's potential (pun not intended) role in the solar system and the cosmos now?

How many more "one offs" must there be before a series of one offs becomes a PATTERN of one offs and is actually recognized more widely? Just asking. I mean they said the same thing to Arp on discovering discordant redshifts (there is now ample data). They kept dismissing on the grounds of "just another one-off" or "random noise." So, more recently they've done a study on, I think it was seyfert galaxies and QSO's {?} along the minor ejection axis, and got fairly strongly positive results correlating QSO's to ejection along Seyfert's minor axis. I think they're still fighting to get it published, last I heard.

So, how many one-offs before they become a series or even a pattern, then the standard?

Do I need to point out the massively filamentary structures being imaged by Chandra, Hubble, Spitzer, et al?

Can we at least agree that the filaments are in fact filaments and not a large diffuse gas cloud?

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/n49/
http://sscws1.ipac.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=sig06-030

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/crab/
http://sscws1.ipac.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=sig06-028

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/casa/

http://sscws1.ipac.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=ssc2006-21a

I swear, if I hear one more reference to "winds" of charged particles. Charged particles "flowing" should be referred to correctly as "currents" (e.g. "electrical current"). That's pretty darn close to the definition of a current.

Anyway, enough from me. The articles and images stand on their own merits. Filamentation in plasma is a distinctly electrical signature. Likewise, magnetic fields cannot be "frozen in" to plasma, Alfven recanted/refuted the erroneous assumption of "frozen in" fields, instead asserting that ignoring the electrical motivation of magnetic fields would set back physics/astrophysics 50 years. And here we are, going on a few decades later. How much further could we be if the astrophysical community hadn't ignored him? *sigh*

Enough history. Let's just go forward from here with the recognition that electricity DOES flow in space and DOES "do things" in space. Very beautiful and filamentary things. Also very thusfar misunderstood things.

Read, ignore, whatever. Hope you at least liked the pretty pictures! Sorry I didn't have any movies of shiny objects for y'all. Kidding...