Scientists Get Their Best-Ever Look At Jupiter's Atmosphere and Storms (space.com) 13
Scientists have gotten their most detailed view of the wild storms that swirl through the gas giant's atmosphere. Space.com reports: Every 53 days, Juno skims over Jupiter's cloud tops in a close approach called a perijove, gathering data all the while. Among the spacecraft's instruments is a microwave radiometer, which is tuned to identify lightning strikes and study what ammonia and water vapor are doing in the gas giant's atmosphere. The scientists behind the new research arranged to target Hubble and Gemini to study Jupiter in coordination with Juno's schedule. So while Juno studies a swath of the gas giant as it passes overhead, Hubble and Gemini study the bigger picture of atmospheric activity on Jupiter.
Juno has made 26 flybys of the gas giant to date, which means the trio of observatories have built up quite a data set about Jupiter's atmosphere, and scientists have only released the most preliminary findings to date. But those findings already suggested that lightning was most common in a feature that scientists call a filamentary cyclone. "These cyclonic vortices could be internal energy smokestacks, helping release internal energy through convection," Michael Wong, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new research, said in the NASA statement. That convection pulls layers of Jupiter's atmosphere up and down depending on factors like temperature and humidity. Earth's atmosphere does this as well, but not in exactly the same way.
In the meantime, the researchers behind the observatory collaboration have already answered one longstanding question about Jupiter's atmosphere, specifically the Great Red Spot storm that has roiled for centuries. Astronomers had long wondered whether transient seemingly dark spots in the storm are caused by a different compound in the atmosphere or by gaps in the cloud cover. And combining the data gathered in close succession by Hubble and Gemini allowed scientists to answer that question: because the dark spots shine brightly in infrared, as deep water clouds do, they seem to represent gaps in upper clouds. "The scientists are also using the data set to analyze zonal winds, atmospheric waves, convective storms, cyclonic vortices and polar atmospheric phenomena like hazes -- and, of course, they anticipate that plenty of other scientific puzzles will benefit from the observations as well," the report adds.
Juno has made 26 flybys of the gas giant to date, which means the trio of observatories have built up quite a data set about Jupiter's atmosphere, and scientists have only released the most preliminary findings to date. But those findings already suggested that lightning was most common in a feature that scientists call a filamentary cyclone. "These cyclonic vortices could be internal energy smokestacks, helping release internal energy through convection," Michael Wong, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new research, said in the NASA statement. That convection pulls layers of Jupiter's atmosphere up and down depending on factors like temperature and humidity. Earth's atmosphere does this as well, but not in exactly the same way.
In the meantime, the researchers behind the observatory collaboration have already answered one longstanding question about Jupiter's atmosphere, specifically the Great Red Spot storm that has roiled for centuries. Astronomers had long wondered whether transient seemingly dark spots in the storm are caused by a different compound in the atmosphere or by gaps in the cloud cover. And combining the data gathered in close succession by Hubble and Gemini allowed scientists to answer that question: because the dark spots shine brightly in infrared, as deep water clouds do, they seem to represent gaps in upper clouds. "The scientists are also using the data set to analyze zonal winds, atmospheric waves, convective storms, cyclonic vortices and polar atmospheric phenomena like hazes -- and, of course, they anticipate that plenty of other scientific puzzles will benefit from the observations as well," the report adds.
Wow nonessential activity. (Score:1)
Re:Wow nonessential activity. (Score:4, Informative)
No. It represents a good use of taxpayer money. The cost of the Jupiter work is orders of magnitude less than a space station or moon base. I find it helps to have a sense of proportion, sort of like a Total Perspective Vortex from Douglas Adams.
Re:Wow nonessential activity. (Score:4, Informative)
Big surprise for a world that is shutdown to nonessential activity due to scary virus.
You would realize-- if you read the article [nationalastro.org]-- that this is a news story about results just published in the April 2020 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The paper itself [iop.org] says it was submitted in August 2019, before anybody had even heard about COVID-19, much less shut down "nonessential activities". And that, the paper is about "Three years of imaging observations using the international Gemini Observatory.". So this is about observations made over the course of many years ago, long before the current shutdown.
So I assume your comment is imitating deliberate cluelessness as an attempt as humor?
Yessir, the high life at NASA continues. Just a bunch of rich kids playing with taxpayer funded toys, meanwhile, we don't have a real space station or moonbase. NASA is completely ineffective, incompetent and corrupt.
Impossible to tell if this is sarcastic, ironic, a parody of slashdot cluelesness, or is a troll.
Re:Wow nonessential activity. (Score:4, Informative)
What, you want NASA to stop Juno in its tracks for a few month? Maybe close the shutter on Hubble too? Neither thing is even possible, much less desirable, there's absolutely no reason not to receive and process the data that they're going to acquire, in fact it would be an enormous waste not to.
Duplicate? (Score:5, Interesting)
There was another story on this around a day ago [slashdot.org] although this one does use different sources.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a dupe (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Note that he said "since centuries", not "for centuries". Was there a period in history described as "the centuries"? He may be even older than we think.
"Scientific Report" (Score:2)
... "miles"
hrm
Astro (Score:3)
Juno skims over Jupiter's cloud tops in a close approach called a perijove
I know the "jove" comes from "Jupiter", as in the saying "By Jove", but this suggests in perigee, the gee means "Earth". Sure enough, it's the same ge sound as in gaia, a poetical form of ge.
Now get the apojove away from me!