Saturday, March 10, 2018

Iffy Forecast

At the link, the photo shown is an infrared view of the underside of Jupiter's clouds on its south pole. The images were taken by Juno, a spacecraft orbiting our solar system's largest planet and learning quite a bit about it.

The thing that's kind of mind-blowing is that the central cyclone is surrounded by a bunch of them in a kind of rosette pattern, and each of them is somewhere between 3,500 and 4,400 miles in diameter. At the equator, the diameter of the entire Earth is just under 4,000 miles. There are eight more surrounding the center cyclone at the north pole, each about 2,500 miles in diameter.

Weather prediction on Jupiter would probably be pretty easy: "It's going to storm. A lot. Forever."

No comments: