About dead bodies in the neighborhood and perfect storms

Image of Jupiter captured by 'Juno'.NASA / JPL-CaltechSw / RIMSSS / Kevin M. Gill

We often talk about funding space research and how this helps us understand phenomena for which we don't yet have a full understanding down here.

There are many examples of a

(something in exchange for something) that sometimes manifests itself in a more obvious way than others. For me one of the most paradigmatic is found in the study of Venus. Here next door, just outside our planet, we have a hellish world, perpetually covered with clouds, hostile to life and without water. The impaled corpse of a sister world, twin to ours, but with gently rolling hills where Hobbits could have run, but with its thick atmosphere and droplets of sulfuric acid it leaves little room for the game of life. The past of Venus has a name and surname, it is called “Greenhouse Effect” and I have always thought that it is like those decapitated bodies that were placed at the gates of conquered cities to warn of what the victors were capable of doing. There it is, just outside to the left, in the direction of the Sun.It should be a good wake-up call to prevent our catastrophe. The one we're headed for if we don't change the way we deal with the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on our planet. There is no time left. Let's do something.

And with that said, let's talk storms. If someone were to look at our solar system from a distance, they would probably come to the conclusion that here we have a Sun, a big giant planet that is Jupiter, and a lot of debris, including us. In fact, the great planet has twice the mass of all the planets, asteroids and comets combined. Everything else that orbits the Sun would not even reach us to build half a planet like Jupiter. It is the largest, the most massive and also the fastest rotating, the one with the shortest day. Here we complain, but there one day nothing spreads. Its equator completes an orbit in 9 hours, 50 minutes, and 28 seconds. Of course, 4 minutes and 47 seconds are gained by moving to the poles where the rotation is slower. This phenomenon is called differential rotation and,Apart from making the day longer as we move away from the equator towards the poles, it is also a phenomenon that is observed in the stars and teaches us that we are not dealing with solid bodies, but that they are fluids. In fact the giant Jupiter is made mostly of the lightest elements that exist in the universe, hydrogen and helium in its atmosphere, with methane and ammonia, water vapor and other gases in small amounts. It is more like the Sun in its composition than it is like us.water vapor and other gases in small quantities. It is more like the Sun in its composition than it is like us.water vapor and other gases in small quantities. It is more like the Sun in its composition than it is like us.

the biggest storm

Jupiter does not have a solid surface, but its atmosphere, a turbulent place, with large vortices between 100 and 1000 km, has some stable atmospheric patterns, such as the Great Red Spot.

The Great Red Spot is the largest and longest storm in the solar system.

It seems that the Roman king of gods and men likes to be top of the class in everything.

The Great Red Spot makes a complete revolution, counterclockwise, every six days and has survived at least three centuries.

Its longevity can be explained by the absence of a solid surface immediately below the clouds present in the planet's atmosphere.

On Earth, the patterns of the atmosphere change when they move between the sea and the solid part or when they reach mountainous terrain, it is easy to see when looking at the evolution of hurricanes. Cyclones grow by continually gobbling up smaller clouds and drawing energy from them to keep them spinning. Cyclones seen at Jupiter's north pole are similar to turbulence patterns in Earth's ocean. It is important to remember that water and air are both fluids and from physics we can study them exactly the same.

But we can also learn many other things from the giant. On Earth, and on Venus and Mars, weather patterns are the result of the movement of air masses. The energy of the Sun, being absorbed on the surface and in the atmosphere of the planet, causes this movement. Something different happens on Jupiter, and that is that the planet itself, due to its large size, still retains part of the energy from its formation 4.5 billion years ago. The result is that it still emits almost twice as much energy in the infrared as it does from the Sun and that the temperature increases with depth. We are, therefore, before a fluid heated from the outside and from the inside. An efficient way of transporting heat is the phenomenon known as convection, similar to the phenomenon we observe every time we see a pumpkin soup boil.If we also put the dense soup in the pot to rotate, we would generate the same type of movements that we observe on Jupiter known as zonal winds with speeds of up to 500 km/h or in the Earth's atmosphere at a lower speed. The colored areas on the planet correspond to cold material sinking and hot material rising.

We obtain this type of information from kamikaze probes such as the

probe . Also from comet impacts in the giant's atmosphere such as that of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993. Now we have

, a spacecraft that entered Jupiter's orbit in 2016, and that every 53 days passes just 5000 km from Jupiter. the tops of the planet's clouds. At such close range, Juno's instruments can detect radio waves emitted by lightning, allowing it to see through storm clouds. Thunderstorms and northern lights, cyclones and anticyclones, cometary impacts and centuries-old giant vortices have been glimpsed on Jupiter, could it get any more fascinating?

Eva Villaver

Cosmic Void

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