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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: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:01PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:01PM (#641280) Journal

    We're unfortunately limited by the history of the telescope. With Robert Hooke and Giovanni Cassini possibly seeing it around 1664-1665.

    We're missing out on a lot of great phenomenon due to still being in the Dark Ages. Millions of objects like 'Oumuamua [wikipedia.org] are zipping into the solar system and right back out every year, but we confirmed the first one in 2017. In the far future, we may be able to spot them before they enter the solar system and use propulsion systems or other methods to guide them into becoming captured objects, thus increasing the amount of usable material ($$$) in our solar system.

    We were also lucky to see Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 [wikipedia.org] impact Jupiter in 1994. The Jupiter-orbiting Galileo spacecraft was still on its way to Jupiter when it made observations of the impact (from 1.6 AU away), and Hubble had launched in 1990 and had its optics fixed by Servicing Mission 1 just months earlier.

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:39PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:39PM (#641307) Journal

    We are limited. We also get better and better as time goes on. (We hope!) The shrinking of the GRS, though, seems to have been accelerating recently. Anecdotally, it used to be an easy catch through a modest aperture (60s-70s) according to others I've talked to. Now making it out can be a challenge.

    Shoemaker-Levy 9 was totally awesome. And you got me into looking at amateur efforts to detect lunar impacts in near-real-time (speed of light delay being the limiting factor). If I ever get free time for astronomy again I might want to get into making observations - I'm primarily a lunar observer anyway.

    And whatever I think about the comparison, the Neptune story was interesting to read.

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