Great Red Spot of Jupiter - A new understanding Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment The story: For years...
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Great Red Spot of Jupiter - A new understanding
- The story: For years, Earthlings have been mesmerised by the beauty and scale of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The storm is so big it could swallow Earth, and it extends very deep beneath the planet’s cloud tops.
- NASA's latest: NASA’s Juno spacecraft discovered that the monster storm, though shrinking, has a depth of between 350 kilometers and 500 kilometers. When combined with its width of 16,000 kilometers, the Great Red Spot resembles a fat pancake in new 3D images of the planet. The mission’s lead scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a hard cutoff at the bottom of the storm.
- The Great Red Spot is probably the tallest Jovian storm measured so far with Juno’s microwave and gravity-mapping instruments
- Thousands of storms rage across the gas giant at any given time beautiful and colourful swirls, plumes and filaments covering the entire planet, as seen by the spacecraft’s camera.
- By contrast, some of the surrounding jet streams extend an estimated 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) into Jupiter.
- Launched in 2011, Juno has been orbiting the solar system’s largest planet since 2016. NASA recently extended the mission by another four years, to 2025.
- Features of GRS: The researchers now find that vertical flows hold the key to the Great Red Spot's longevity: When the storm loses energy, vertical flows move hot and cold gases in and out of the storm, restoring part of the vortex's energy. The GRS rotates counterclockwise, with a period of about six Earth days or fourteen Jovian days. The storm has raged since at least 1830 and possibly since the mid-1600s, when the red spot may have been first seen from Earth. It is about 40 times as deep as the Mariana Trench on Earth.
- Jupiter the planet: After the Sun, the Moon and Venus, Jupiter is the brightest and is one of five planets which can be seen by naked eye from Earth. Jupiter is the only planet that has a center of mass with the Sun that lies outside the volume of the Sun, though by only 7% of the Sun's radius. Jupiter has a unique cloud layer. Jupiter is made of mostly hydrogen and helium gas. Trying to land on Jupiter would be a bad idea, as one could only free-float with no escape whatsoever. The temperature in the clouds of Jupiter is about minus 145 degrees Celsius. The temperature near the planet's center is much, much hotter. The core temperature may be about 24,000 degrees Celsius.
- The largest planet in the Solar System is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun.
- It likely has a rocky core of heavier elements,[16] but like the other giant planets, Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface.
- Surrounding Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter's magnetic tail is nearly 800 million km long, covering the entire distance to Saturn's orbit. Jupiter has 80 known moons and possibly many more. Ganymede is the largest of these.
- Formation: Jupiter took shape when the rest of the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become this gas giant. Jupiter took most of the mass left over after the formation of the Sun, ending up with more than twice the combined material of the other bodies in the solar system. In fact, Jupiter has the same ingredients as a star, but it did not grow massive enough to ignite. About 4 billion years ago, Jupiter settled into its current position in the outer solar system, where it is the fifth planet from the Sun. The composition of Jupiter is similar to that of the Sun – mostly hydrogen and helium. Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system – an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water.
- Summary: Jupiter is almost the Sun that never could be. The possibility of finding life is nearly zero, but scientists are interested in knowing more about this gas giant, as it opens many windows into understanding the origin of the solar system itself.
- EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the evolution of the solar system. Could Jupiter have been the second sun? Why or why not? (2) What techniques are used by space agencies to control spacecraft that travel to remote planets and celestial bodies? Explain.
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