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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, @11:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:23PM (#641497)

    Liquid oxygen burns fairly cleanly. It is just a total pain to store and create.

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday February 22 2018, @09:52PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @09:52PM (#642004) Journal

    Liquid oxygen burns fairly cleanly. It is just a total pain to store and create.

    As I understand it, the oxygen does not, strictly speaking, get burned. The oxygen, well, oxidizes the fuel which causes the fuel to become "burned up".

    Also, liquid oxygen [wikipedia.org] is extremely cold with a freezing point of 54.36 K (−218.79 °C; −361.82 °F) and a boiling point of 90.19 K (−182.96 °C; −297.33 °F).

    Those temperatures are not conducive to ignition. =)

    Note that I did not say it was impossible. If I recall correctly, a rather dramatic example of this caused one of the SpaceX rockets to blow up. Apparently, some of the super-cooled oxygen actually froze within the carbon fiber overwrap of the even-colder liquid helium pressure vessel. As things flexed, the imbedded, frozen oxygen (oxidizer) combined explosively with the carbon (fuel) causing loss of craft.

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.