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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the Lady-Macbeth-would-be-pleased dept.

The most famous atmospheric features of both Jupiter and Neptune may be gone soon:

When we think of storms on the other planets in our Solar System, we automatically think of Jupiter. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a fixture in our Solar System, and has lasted 200 years or more. But the storms on Neptune are different: they're transient.

[...] "It looks like we're capturing the demise of this dark vortex, and it's different from what well-known studies led us to expect," said Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley, referring to work by Ray LeBeau (now at St. Louis University) and Tim Dowling's team at the University of Louisville. "Their dynamical simulations said that anticyclones under Neptune's wind shear would probably drift toward the equator. We thought that once the vortex got too close to the equator, it would break up and perhaps create a spectacular outburst of cloud activity."

Rather than going out in some kind of notable burst of activity, this storm is just fading away. And it's also not drifting toward the equator as expected, but is making its way toward the south pole. Again, the inevitable comparison is with Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS). The GRS is held in place by the prominent storm bands in Jupiter's atmosphere. And those bands move in alternating directions, constraining the movement of the GRS. Neptune doesn't have those bands, so it's thought that storms on Neptune would tend to drift to the equator, rather than toward the south pole.

Neptune's Great Dark Spot may not have the support of atmospheric storm bands, but Jupiter's Great Red Spot is also on the decline:

A ferocious storm has battered Jupiter for at least 188 years. From Earth, it is observed as red swirling clouds racing counter-clockwise in what is known as the planet's "Great Red Spot." But after shrinking for centuries, it may now be on the brink of disappearing for good.

"In truth, the GRS [Great Red Spot] has been shrinking for a long time," lead Juno mission team member and planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Glenn Orton told Business Insider in an email. "The GRS will in a decade or two become the GRC (Great Red Circle). Maybe sometime after that the GRM"—the Great Red Memory.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:53AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:53AM (#641079)

    Expect the super-massive blackholes at the centre of our galaxy to evaporate faster.

    (grin)

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:39AM (#641091)

    Oh, my! Your feces baby's feces baby is giving birth to another feces baby! I think a certain fetid existenceness will have to fertilize that too...

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:16AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:16AM (#641104)
    The supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy has a temperature of about 10-14 K. That means that with the cosmic microwave background at a comparatively scorching 2.7 K, it's getting slightly bigger just by sitting there, because it's absorbing that radiation. The black hole won't start evaporating until the temperature of the universe gets even colder than it already is, in maybe 10106 years or so. If it's getting hotter, that means it's absorbing more radiation than it emits, meaning it's getting even bigger, and it's going to take even longer for it to evaporate as a result!
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:50PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:50PM (#641142) Journal

      If it's getting hotter, that means it's absorbing more radiation than it emits, meaning it's getting even bigger, and it's going to take even longer for it to evaporate as a result!

      Interesting but incorrect.
      The intensity of the Hawking radiation is inversely proportional with the mass of the blackhole: the hotter the blackhole, the smaller the mass.
      So if it's getting hotter, it means the blackhole shrinks and is actually loosing more radiation then it absorbs (citation [ucr.edu])

      However, you are correct in one aspect: trying to "heat" a blackhole by pumping energy from outside will only make it colder.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:57PM (#641145)
        Damn pronouns. Meant to say that if the *universe* is getting hotter, then the black hole is only going to get bigger because it will be absorbing all that energy from outside. That was what the idiot I was replying to was trying to imply after all.