Patterns in the initial System III longitudes of Saturn’s Great White Spots 1876-2010
2025 December 9
Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Volume 135, Issue 6, Pages 407–410 (2025)
A B S T R A C T
In this paper, we present details of the observed initial System III longitudes for Saturn’s Great White Spots (GWS). The System III (core) discovery longitudes for the 1903 and 1960 GWS, which arose respectively in the North Tropical and North North Temperate Zones, were found to lie within a single degree of each other, suggesting a subsurface influence fixed in longitude. Likewise, the equatorial GWS of 1933 and 1990 were only some 4 degrees apart in their initial longitudes. We propose and describe a relationship between these sources, similar to the ‘permanent sources’ once postulated for the South Equatorial Belt Revivals on Jupiter.
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