If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up The winds whirring round the outer edge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have grown more powerful over the past decade, reaching speeds of at least 400 miles per hour, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown. Astronomers have spent more than 150 years observing Jupiter’s iconic feature, a gigantic oval-shaped splodge measuring 10,000- …
"With this being a UK site"
ElReg doesn't seem to think so ... "The Register is a leading and trusted global online enterprise technology news publication" is the way they put it.
Actually Rhode Island was once one of His Britannic Majesties Colonies Across the Seas but never part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and other sundry odds and sods.
Although I believe there was some argy bargy at the time from Massachusetts claiming Rhode Island like most of Connecticut was actually their and still part of Massachusetts. The Bay Colony. Most of the initial settlers in RI and CT having bailed from MA seeing as so many in MA were such a royal pain in the a*se.
Some things never change..
Well RI was part of Avalonia which had large chunks of the British Isles at the other end. Minus most of Scotland. The Scottish bits only joined up in Laurentia which then toyed with being in several super continents but then the inevitable spit happened with the various members having solo careers or joining other groups. The British Isles joining the Eurasian combo whereas RI and the rest of New England struck out on tour with the new North American plate. Quickly putting a lot of sea-floor spreading between itself and its old neighbors.
So RI never really attached to Scotland. They just traveled in the same tour bus for a short period of time. Geologically speaking.
all bad jokes aside an ice skater spins faster with arms pulled inwards. Something about centripetal force and rotational momentum.
so as the spot gets smaller... the winds spin it faster maybe?
(I suppose it depends on whether we're looking at a hurricane or the top of a massive tornado)
all bad jokes aside an ice skater spins faster with arms pulled inwards. Something about centripetal force and rotational momentum.
That would seem to be the case. I vaguely remember my high school science teacher explaining it as a large storm system. But he wrote it off his explanation as just a "guess".
Is it possible the larger size of Jupiter compared to Earth not only makes the "storm" bigger but also last longer? Then we need to know why it is red? Is the planet covered in red soil?
Yeah, that's the theory. A problem with it, though, is that the spot has been effectively stationary for hundreds of years, implying that something lower is essentially static and thusly impliedly effectively solid. Plus we have this continuous upwelling of red fluid at its core.
It's strongly reminiscent of a volcano. Which would suggest some sort of crust over something fluid(ish) and under pressure, venting through a weak spot; the red being the underlying sub-sub-stratum of fluid.
So the red spot implies that the theory of gas giants being relatively homogeneously gas all the way down is wrong. OR that there is some gas which (a) separates out naturally by different weight, AND under pressure becomes so viscous as to be essentially solid but without undergoing the phase change to soar in density/collapse in volume by becoming liquid or solid OR if it has, it's still lighter than the (red) gas beneath it.
Fascinating stuff. We live, on Earth, in a staggeringly tiny sliver of physical reality's variations. I want to EXPLORE, dammit!
I'd like to get smarter, so please disabuse me of my misunderstandings.
I was just looking at the Voyager I imaging of the spot (a time lapsed image taken each rotation of the planet so that the spot appears stationary with respect to the spacecraft). From that imaging it appears there are several laminar flows on the planet all traveling West to East (implying a planetary rotation that matches Earth's) and one very dark flow just north of the spot in the contrary direction (East to West).
Doesn't a vortex tend to form when two contrary currents pass by each other? In my ignorance, I would be looking for the cause of that apparent East to West (relative to the spot) flow and expect the spot to be driven and controlled by the intensity of those currents.
As I recall, apparently a system actually needs to be quasi-2D or else such weather features have no stability; so it's allowed a thickness (here height), but it has to be a thin thickness; but perhaps being attached to a boundary also helps. I forget the mathematical details, but this is why (e.g.) weather systems (in the earth's thin atmosphere) are much more persistent than turbulent motions in volume, which rapidly cascade down to smaller scales and dissipate.
Yes. For a hurricane to form you need a source of heat heating the area of low pressure air from below.
On Earth that heat comes from the oceans, so as hurricanes reach land their source of heat disappears and they weaken and dissipate.
Because Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface, it's most probably heat from the liquid core that is fuelling this storm and helping to sustain it almost indefinitely.
also you have fastest spinning at the equator, and in the 'hurricane region' the differences in speed (over small latitude changes) are the highest. So you also have slow vs fast air, coupled with (probable) liquid core, solar heating, and not a whole lot of possible things to slow it down (like land masses and a relatively thinner atmosphere that you find on Earth).
And the discoloration of the red spot may affect temperature of things it 'shadows'. be of a different mass than the rest of the atmosphere, etc. etc. all contributing to its formation and behavior.
The first "official" observation of the Great Red Spot was in 1831 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe.
However, there were earlier reports of spots on Jupiter. Robert Hooke observed on 9 May 1664 "a small spot in the biggest of the 3 obscurer Belts of Jupiter".
This was later, apparently confirmed by Giovanni Cassini: "Besides that Transient Shadow last mentioned, there hath been observed, by Mr. Hook first ... and since by M. Cassini, a permanent Spot in the Disque of Jupiter."
Both are recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1666. Pages 3 and 143, respectively.
https://archive.org/details/Philosophicaltr1Roya/page/2/mode/2up
[The quotes given have been "modernized" by replacing use of the 'long s' with the more commonly used 's' we are familiar with. https://faqbite.com/why/why-did-people-write-f-instead-of-s-in-old-books/]
You can also see what looks like the Red Spot in Donato Creti's 1711 Astronomical canvas featuring Jupiter. He painted a series of 8 canvases - each featuring one of the the 5 known planets, the sun, the moon, and a comet in the background - using the best available knowledge of these bodies at the time.
http://images.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/I/big/77j538a.jpg
"Besides that Transient Shadow last mentioned, there hath been observed, by Mr. Hook first ... and since by M. Cassini, a permanent Spot in the Disque of Jupiter."
I bet Neal Stephenson wishes he knew about this factoid while he was writing his Baroque Cycle books. It could have taken things in a very different direction.
I was going to make a similar comment, along the lines of "It's McCarthy spinning faster and faster because of all the Commie sympathizers in today's Republican Party leadership", but I thought better of it.
Tough crowd 'round here. Have a beer.
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I was just reading this:
https://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2021/09/21/engineering-researchers-develop-new-explanation-for-formation-of-vortices-in-2d-superfluid/
“Identifying the true mechanism for the spontaneous formation of Onsager vortices in 2D BECs represents a major progress in our understanding of 2D superfluid turbulence,” Guo said. “Our findings about the point vortices on a sphere may represent a conceptually interesting model of a planetary atmosphere, and these findings can be tested experimentally at NASA’s space laboratory.”
"We're talking about such a small change that if you didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data," said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
We can infer the end of that sentence, but does the writer want to fill us in on the rest of what Amy Simon said, just for closure?
I think its the visible side effects of ongoing attempts by deep-dwelling denizens to put tentacles in space.
That or a long term project to counteract global cooling by either spiralling the planet inwards or ejecting large gobs of material at the sun in order to turn it up a bit.
Or (and I think this is less likely), it could be a cunning plan to slow down the planet's rotation before they all get too giddy and start throwing up.
Monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths monoliths......
Wild guess from an uneducated potato...
Red tends to show up a lot with the presence of iron, eventually, it's got to run out of iron or whatever is causing the red hue to be thrown up to the surface, no? (Smaller spot)
Compared to a lot of other atmospheric particles and gasses, iron is also quite heavy, less of it allows the wind to speed up even more, no?
The spot is extremely hot, it doesn't move, so... Whatever is down there at the surface is likely to be getting more exhausted? Like a fissure or volcano or no? The behaviour is not that dissimilar from watching water whirlpool down a sink drain; With the whirlpool getting smaller and smaller, reaching maximum velocity until it collapses.
Then ignoring accounts for solar activities, like, the planets in general warming up as we pass a band of high-energy space with our galaxy (because we do not have a 'fixed' point in space, not even remotely) with our altered geomagnetic field thanks to human interference (satellites and the what not) Jupiter and it's moons have also been pummelled by it's powerful aurora to generate immense belts of heat... So...
Jupiter undergoing climate change? But I am not well versed on the subject, I am but potato. (O,, o)
Jupiters spot is both speeding up and getting smaller.
The climate of Jupiter has obviously changed over the years.
clearly something we’ve done on this planet is causing what we see on Jupiter.
We must do something and do it soon. It must be something on a global scale and something everyone must contribute to.
It’s not a punishment but if we don’t do it it’ll have a detrimental and catastrophic impact in the next 10 years!! We’ve already seen the situation change for the worse over the last 10 years so it’s undeniable it’ll continue to change.
We must act now in unison to ward off any future changes.
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