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 M¢25  Funded By Mahalo ? |  August 15, 2009 02:20 PM

What causes Saturn internal heat?

What is causing the heat?
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August 15, 2009 04:45 PM
Saturn, which radiates almost three times more energy than it receives from the Sun, is a more complicated case as it is not massive enough to retain its primeval heat of formation 4.5 billion years ago.

The explanation for this strange state of affairs, first suggested by Ed Salpeter of Cornell and David Stevenson of Caltech, also explains the mystery of Saturn's apparent helium deficit, all in one neat package. At the temperatures and high pressures found in Jupiter's interior, liquid helium dissolves in liquid hydrogen. In Saturn, where the internal temperature is lower, the helium doesn't dissolve so easily, and tends to form droplets instead. The phenomenon is familiar to cooks who know that it is generally much easier to dissolve ingredients in hot liquids than in cold ones. Saturn probably started out with a fairly uniform mix of hydrogen and helium, but the helium tended to condense out of the surrounding hydrogen, much as water vapor condenses out of Earth's atmosphere to form a mist. The amount of helium condensation was greatest in the planet's cool outer layers, where the mist turned to rain about 2 billion years ago. A light shower of liquid helium has been falling through Saturn's interior ever since. This helium precipitation is responsible for depleting the outer layers of their helium content. ...As the helium sinks toward the center, the planet's gravitational field compresses it and heats it up. is a "gas giant," a planet without a surface. As the helium in the outer layers "rained" down into the lower levels it was squeezed into a smaller space due to gravity, which caused the helium atoms to bump into each other more often. That is, the helium heated up according to Boyle's law. - D.M.

This is exactly from a debate site:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/internal_heat.html

Saturn is less massive and, for that reason, the internal pressures are lower. Even so, it's thought that Saturn also contains liquid metallic hydrogen in its interior.
ALSO
It is thought that Jupiter and Saturn possess rocky and icy cores, with masses ranging between 10 and 15 times the Earth's mass. The exterior surfaces of these cores must be subjected to a temperature of 20 000 ºK in Jupiter and 12 000 ºK in Saturn. At those surfaces, the pressure must be 42 megabars (million bars) in Jupiter and 12 megabars in Saturn. In the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn, the convection creates and sustains powerful dynamos in the zones of metallic hydrogen, which in turn generate strong magnetic fields.

Another source of internal heat in the giant planets is the tides provoked by their satellites. This fact triggers the creation of currents in the internal fluids, which very gradually slow down the rotation of the planet. A portion of the energy thus generated also helps moving the satellite into farther orbits.The internal heat is transported through convection until it reaches a zone of the atmosphere that is transparent to the infrared radiation, which can irradiate the heat directly into space and, this way, get cooler. It's thought that the convective flows provoked by the generation of internal heat hold a very important role in the dynamics of the giant planets' winds.
Source(s):
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arg...

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August 15, 2009 03:01 PM
The temperatures below Saturn's clouds are much higher than those at the top of the clouds. The planet gives off about 2 1/2 times as much heat as it receives from the sun.

Many astronomers believe that much of Saturn's internal heat comes from energy generated by the sinking of helium slowly through the liquid hydrogen in the planet's interior.
Source(s):
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/saturn_worldbook.html


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