Jupiter is deep

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/whoa-like-jupiter-is-deep-really-really-deep

by rbanffy • 8 years ago

424 69 8 years ago

tritium2• 8 years ago

Hey, neat!

Jupiter almost has an octagon on it's north pole (and nearly a pentagonal version on it's south pole), similar to Saturn's northern polar hexagon!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=1930

BLanen• 8 years ago

Well, that was mentioned in the article too.

tritium2• 8 years ago

Yes, and now you’ve mentioned that it was mentioned in the article. So here we are, mentioning things.

bitwize• 8 years ago

The polar cyclone systems look like Magic Roundabouts.

vanderZwan• 8 years ago

Somehow, I knew this was Phil Plait from the title. Love his stuff. And this reminded me that I forgot to migrate my RSS feeds with Phil Plait to his new blog location. Thanks!

pwaivers• 8 years ago

The renderings are amazing looking! It makes Jupiter looks like an evil planet.

Scarbutt• 8 years ago

I think that's the fault of the infrared thing.

Godel_unicode4• 8 years ago

Infrared is by definition not what you would think of as a color. The colors in that picture are false, and a stylistic choice made during the rendering process. It would be just as accurate to use shades of blue and make it look icy. Perhaps more accurate as the upper atmosphere portrayed here is very, very cold.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

Those aren't renderings, they are composite images made from photographs taken of Jupiter using an infrared camera on the Juno spacecraft.

Godel_unicode4• 8 years ago

What word would you use for composite false-color images produced by a computer if not "renderings"?

throwaway0255• 8 years ago

Really interesting content but this site has one of the most aggressive, unpredictable and annoying slide-down headers I've ever seen.

Displaying written content on the web should be so simple, yet all the content producers have invented their own special blend of ways to fuck it up.

Slide-down headers. Share links widgets that overlap content. Video plays without asking and follows you down the page. Entire page lags while 800 javascript snippets load. Text is some stylish but unreadable low-contrast color. Modals begging you for your email.

I manually edit the DOM and CSS of sites on an almost daily basis now just so I can read it.

pavlov• 8 years ago

It's a real shame how HTML completely screwed up the "markup" part by not offering a separate API for UI chrome. If Netscape had offered some way to define navigation separately from the textual content, it might still have saved us. Now it's all just a jumble: documents that describe UI views that describe document fragments that describe UI controls.

wruza• 8 years ago

I hope annoy blockers will be next internet thing soon. Block interacts with scroll - blocked. Big blocks overlap - blocked one that has less text. Inserts itself in-between later than 3 seconds after load - blocked. Looks like header - blocked. “This site is completely idiotic and can harm your senses, are you sure you want to visit it at all?”

Flash ads seem like toys now compared to this weapon of mass ux destruction.

phkahler• 8 years ago

FYI I think you got down voted due to the phrase "f--- it up". HN is generally open to criticism of things like that but tends to prefer a more non-confrontational tone.

euler_• 8 years ago

Why the title change?

Double_Cast• 8 years ago

So... do astronomers truly have no idea why the 9 polar cyclones don't combine? I can't imagine what mechanism might prevent this.

crygin• 8 years ago

It's a relatively common phenomenon in hydrodynamics (specifically, the formation of large separated cyclones in unstable flow), and the best explanation is delightful -- Onsager's "The Little Vortices Who Wanted To Play" (a letter to Linus Pauling, reproduced on page 33 of this PDF: http://bactra.org/sloth/eyink-and-sreenivasan-on-onsager-on-... ).

JesseObrien• 8 years ago

There's an interesting video I've seen before showing it being recreated in a lab. I do not, however, know the origin or reasoning behind why it happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_c9A9Auf0A

Elv13• 8 years ago

chaos theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJAs9Qr359o

pure_ambition• 8 years ago

Jupiter is so cool.

Fun fact, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a huge storm that has been raging for at least 188 years if not much longer. It also has a diameter about 2-3 times as wide as Earth’s.

Jupiter also is believed to be a gravitational shield that protects us from asteroids and comets.

Jupiter is also Home to some of the coolest Moons in our solar system, my favorites being Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede (the Galilean moons), in that order.

One question I’ve always had and hope to learn one day: what the heck is Jupiter’s “surface” like? I know it’s believe to be essentially layers of metallic hydrogen, but what the heck does that even mean? What would it look like? So interesting.

GaltMidas• 8 years ago

Maybe it's like Earth's liquid iron mantle?

dperfect• 8 years ago

It might not exactly answer your question, but you may enjoy this description of what it would be like to fall into Jupiter:

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5041

ghostDancer• 8 years ago

Thanks, that link is fantastic, informative and entertaining at the same time.

JacobAldridge• 8 years ago

Our local cafe recently re-opened as Kallisto; when I first went in, I set up a loyalty card and the owner said 'The system needs a surname, but I discourage using your real personal details.'

So I entered myself as 'Jacob Ganymede'; we've been friends ever since.

psergeant• 8 years ago

One way I know I had an ok childhood was that when I found out the gas giants didn’t have a surface I could stand on, it was a notable and memorable low point

maxerickson• 8 years ago

I think analogy breaks down.

There's probably not any light at the transition between the liquid and metal layers of hydrogen, the liquid layer is thousands of kilometers thick (the deepest ocean is ~11 km). And it's sort of hot. Not stove top pan hot, 10x hotter than that.

Oh and the pressure is a couple million times Earth surface pressure.

vkhorikov• 8 years ago

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMCrPvtN1G8

mbell• 8 years ago

Fun fact, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a huge storm that has been raging for at least 188 years if not much longer. It also has a diameter about 2-3 times as wide as Earth’s.

It's also shrinking at an increasing rate and may be gone within a couple decades.

matte_black2• 8 years ago

Sometimes I wonder how different our world might be if it were the size of Jupiter but at the surface still had the same gravity we have now.

It could take days to download something from the other side of the planet. And probably a month of airplane travel just to get there.

new299• 8 years ago

Latency would be higher, and might make phone calls a little awkward perhaps?, but it shouldn't make any longer to download a file. You might want to modify protocols so they send acknowledgements less often, or use larger packets perhaps.

Godel_unicode4• 8 years ago

Exactly this. It's always amazing to me how latency gets confused with bandwidth.

matte_black2• 8 years ago

Ah yea, I guess you’re right. With a small planet it’s something I never have to think much about since things always seem fast enough.

josu• 8 years ago

And probably a month of airplane travel just to get there.

Space travel would probably be more advanced by now.

Simon_says3• 8 years ago

It would be drastically harder to get out of the gravity well on the planet. Even if the strength of gravity at the surface was the same as Earth’s, the field would be stronger farther out than Earth’s —- 11x as much due to the geometry. It would take 11x more energy to escape the planet, though low orbit would be practically the same difficulty.

tempestn2• 8 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible for such a planet to exist and be habitable. Obviously it would have to be far less dense than Earth (or Jupiter); I'm guessing gravity would therefore compact it to a smaller size, unless maybe it was made out of some kind of lattice structure?

Better question might be what's the largest feasible (or likely) potentially habitable planet with earth-like gravity.

cup-of-tea3• 8 years ago

That's an interesting question. I'm sure it's been considered in science-fiction before. But as I think about I keep thinking about a hollow planet, and then I think about a Dyson sphere. Does that count as a planet?

sliken2• 8 years ago

Mass of Saturn is 100x earth and the gravity is only 6% higher.

zhte4153• 8 years ago

Assuming the existance of something like early human hunter-gatherers, if the earth were the size of Jupiter, we would not have transitioned to living in cities yet. There would be no downloading.

cup-of-tea3• 8 years ago

Why not? Why does a bigger planet mean slower progress?

drewg123• 8 years ago

You should read Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series. It is a fantasy series about a planet that's much larger than earth, but less dense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majipoor_series

bwang29• 8 years ago

One thing that might not be related but I found fascinating is that Jupiter is “木星” in Chinese, where “木” means wooden. The first time “木星” was mentioned in Chinese literature was in 东汉, year 25 - year 220 (around 1800 years ago). So Chinese people back then thought the planet was made of wood! And as a child, this planet has the name easiest to remember, because it looks exactly like a wooden ball.

Edit: I digged deeper and found that it was a coincidence that Jupiter was called the Wooden Planet. The Chinese assigned the name not because they were able to observe the wood like texture (due to the lack of telescope), but they were able to observe the existence of the planet with naked eye as early as 2300 years ago, along with the Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn. These five planets were assigned to the name in the order of "金 gold (Venus)","木 wood (Jupiter)","水 water (Mercury)","火 fire (Mars)"."土 rock (Saturn)" superstitiously. What's really surprising is Venus does look like gold in color and Saturn does look like wood in color. What a coincidence!

lopmotr• 8 years ago

Not an interesting coincidence. Jupiter is hot but Mars gets named fire. Mercury looks like rock (thin atmosphere) but Saturn get called rock. You could find some reason to make almost any naming seem like a coincidence.

gisely• 8 years ago

Not interesting to who? Coincidences can interesting even if they don't point to a causal relationship. I find it interesting that word for Jupiter in Chinese is wood simply because it's an interesting association to make.

simonh• 8 years ago

Mars at least probably isn't a coincidence, in terms of the element assigned, since it's visibly red to the naked eye.

zhte4153• 8 years ago

And in these 5 planets and associated elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing rooted a large number of traditional beliefs: Feng Shui, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Martial Arts.

And arguably stunted progression from them. But that's getting off topic.

kijin• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure the ancient Chinese could see the colors of at least some of the planets. You don't need a telescope to tell that one celestial object looks redder than another, especially if you have good eyesight and no light pollution.

Venus is indeed golden; Jupiter is red-brown like some type of wood; Saturn looks like it's covered in sand (土 can mean dirt as well as rock, and there's a lot of yellow dirt in China); Mars is unmistakably red; and Mercury looks plain white so why not assign it to the only remaining element. Four correct guesses out of five = probably not a coincidence.

posterboy• 8 years ago

White is also prominently used to mean clear, clean water in hydronyms (there's the german city weisswasser, for example).

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

Not knowing Chinese, I also had to look up '星', as parent comment does not explain it. It means planet, so literally 'Wooden Planet'. Nice.

KennyCason• 8 years ago

It can also mean star, it’s pretty general for various astronomical bodies. You can also see it used in the word satellite (卫星), shooting star (流星), etc. gotta love Chinese :)

mnemotronic• 8 years ago

I do glassblowing as a hobby. I'd like to replicate some of the patterns in those pics in glass. Might have to deviate from the color spectrum in the pictures. The reds I use are nowhere near as intense.

ljf• 8 years ago

Please post a 'Show HN' if you ever do! I'd love to see the process and results and maybe even buy one! What an amazing piece of art it would be.

bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

Isn't it pointless to ask why a chaotic turbulent system ended up this particular way? The author keeps repeating this question (or stating "nobody knows"), as if there's some fundamental and interesting answer to it.

madavidj• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if you're playing with words here, but asking questions like these is the most natural way to discover more about physics itself. Of course studying Jupyter is not as fundamental as studying particle physics or string theory, but it's an emergent physics that nobody has fully explored yet.

v_lisivka2• 8 years ago

There's a single Southern Polar Cyclone (the SPC in this case), but only five cyclones around it! They're bigger too, and are different sizes, ranging from 5,600 to 7,000 km across. Again, it's not clear why the poles are different. The fact that there are fewer in the south and they're bigger may be related (I'm guessing, but if you have fewer they can grow to fill more space … ?), but no one really knows.

Maybe because the main cyclone escaped the South pole and now known as Big Red Spot?

rocqua• 8 years ago

That would mean 7 southern cyclones accounted for. This is still different from the 9 on the northern pole.

v_lisivka2• 8 years ago

Maybe because central cyclone merged 2 side cyclones, so it has extra energy to escape South pole.

pvaldes• 8 years ago

At least is a twisted planet, that's for sure.

Jupiter is deep

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