Slashdot Mirror
Huge Storms Converge on Jupiter
tpoker writes to tell us NASA is reporting that the two biggest storms in the solar system are about to collide on Jupiter. From the article: "Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The behemoth has been spinning around Jupiter for hundreds of years. Storm #2 is Oval BA, also known as 'Red Jr.,' a youngster of a storm only six years old. Compared to the Great Red Spot, Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin."
But seriously, did anyone else think that Hollywood is going to use this as the background for The Perfect Storm II?
My other sig is funny.
From the article "There won't be a head-on collision. and the storms' outer bands will pass quite close to one another.
I guess the summary was a little bit of a hyperbole. Esp. for an event that happens every two years.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
And she could swallow earth.
At 350Mph, that's what I call a massive blow job...
Clearly, this is evidence of Jovial warming.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Fascist!
Crap. There go my weekend plans.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Martian looters will be shot on sight.
Astronomers are keeping a vigil on the Great Pee Stain, which they expect will soon merge with the Giant Skid Mark hovering over Uranus any day now.
If you post it, they will read.
Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin. Ahh yes, I dated them in highschool.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
I LOVE astronomy. I think it is simply the most profound thing that we have been able to take the eye and stretch it to points beyond imagination. To look out into the cosmos is so humbling and awe-inspiring. Truly if one science has shown us simple magnificent beauty it is astronomy.
:)
Now having said that I will say that only one thing makes astronomy better - seeing these object in motion! Galaxies and nebula seem so unreal in hubble's photos - it's hard to fully comprehend what exactly they are - what they are really like. But when you view those precious few object we have been able to capture in motion, to me it is exquisite! Somehow, to me, it makes them that much more real, more tangible. And that is truly the dream of the soul - to somehow touch, taste, smell that which is so beautiful
I hope these astronomers string together this phenomenal convergence into a movie!
Jupiter's storms in motion
Solar flares
Do you have any other cool astronomical movie links?
--
Music should be free
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
is what FEMA intends to do about this?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Is /. news for nerds or is it news for middle school dropouts?
/. editors for? The quote came from TFA. And from my experience in submitting, the editors rarely edit a submitted post (though there were times I hoped they would...).
What are you complaining about
The original quote was written by a NASA PR rep. And he/she was writing it to the general audience in the U.S, not for slashdotters.
Actually, their math is wrong. If the great red spot is twice as wide as earth is, then its radius is 12,756.3 km and the earth's is 6378.15. That means that the great red spot is an area of approximately 510950815.6266 square kilometers and the earth's cross section has an area of approximately 127737703.90665 square kilometers. As you can plainly see, the area of the great red spot is 4 times that of the earth. If Red Jr. is half the size of the Great Red Spot, then it must have half the area, namely, 255475407.8133 square kilometers. Thus, Red Jr. must have twice the area of the Earth and half that of the Great Red Spot. Da. Somehow, I think they meant that Red Jr. has half the diameter of the Great Red Spot. But whatever. :P
My Systems
... The Perfect Storm?
:-)
I just hope someone tells Clooney and Wahlberg before it's too late this time!
OH NOES!!!!11!!one!1
j/k
Wait
No really. j/k
When it blows on Jupiter, better cover Uranus.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
... that our local news source will be running around the clock coverage of 'Jupiter Storewatch 2006'
AccountKiller
Bravo, and well played. :)
On a Tuesday?
For shame!
A Jupiter native who has to commute between "Big Joe" and "Little Joe" to get to work everyday. Now that sucks...
I don't care about weather reports for cities 500 miles away, so why should I care about weather reports for a planet 500 million miles away???
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Title: Huge Storms Converge on Jupiter
Body: NASA is reporting that the two biggest storms in the solar system are about to collide on Jupiter.
(emphasis added)
Let's not jump the gun here... try to make subject/title lines more accurate please!
If the great red spot is twice as wide as earth is, then its radius is 12,756.3 km and the earth's is 6378.15. That means that the great red spot is an area of approximately 510950815.6266 square kilometers and the earth's cross section has an area of approximately 127737703.90665 square kilometers.
But now you can throw your maths right out the window, because you're using the wrong formula. From Wikipedia, "The Great Red Spot's dimensions are ~24-40,000 km × 12-14,000 km". It's not circular, sorry.
At it's smallest size (which I understand it is close to at the moment - It has halved in size over the past 100 years), it is almost exactly 2 Earths wide, and is also 2 times the Earth's cross-section in area.
a youngster of a storm only six years old. Compared to the Great Red Spot, Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin."
I'm not sure what intergalactic law is, but over here, we call that "statutory rape".
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
mmm... Hyperbole...
Why does Slashdot always accuse Martians of looting but when Earthlings do it its merely "copyright infringement"? Discrimination, that's why. Why the prejudice against the Martians? If you prick them, do they not ooze?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
What kind of strength/magnification do you need to see Jupiter in that resolution?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The New Horizons probe will visit Jupiter early next year. If the merging waits another half year then NH could give us a nice look.
New Horizons is heading toward Pluto, but will use Jupiter to kind of "slingshot" it faster toward Pluto. NASA doesn't want to pay for bigger rockets, so they cheat by stealing a small slice of Jupiter's orbital momentum. Let's hope Big Jup doesn't find out, because he is really really big and strong.
Table-ized A.I.
I can't remember the last /. article to recieve this many blow job jokes.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
We've never seen as large a storm as this ever before. Clearly the only possible explanation is human involvement!
(Yes, global warming may be real, but the utterly non-scientific way it is presented in the media just sets my teeth on edge. Sportatic outliers will always happen. You can't EVER point at a single heat wave or hurricane and say that it is evidence of global warming. You have to look at trending, and the big picture. And yet on NPR in April they had three different scientists saying that Katrina was definitely caused by global warming.)
It doesn't matter. Global warming, global cooling - both at the same time! (e.g. google "global cooling")
As long as man is bad, all is good.
Chuck Norris would beat those both with ONE roundhouse kick.
They don't edit submitted posts?
Really?
Thanks for letting me know, see I am kind of new here and it could have taken me a long time to figure that out!
I think this post wins the "Please Get This Guy a Girlfriend Fast" award. (No, that is NOT "fast girlfriend".)
Table-ized A.I.
A Jupiter native who has to commute between "Big Joe" and "Little Joe" to get to work everyday. Now that sucks...
I know how you feel. From space, LA traffic makes a "Great Brown Spot".
Table-ized A.I.
I personally blame global warming for these super storms. People need to cut back on their motor vehicle use or other planets may suffer the same fate.
I, for one, welcome our new red 350mph overlords...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin.
Who's a lucky Earth then, hey!? Earth getting blown by Jupiter *and* it swallows!
From the journal entry of ShaneThePain:
Once you open your mind to new ideas and possibilities, you will be a much happier person. Discovering fascism was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, I have never been more content with who I am.
Talk about your cult mentality! Tom Cruise just called. He wants his inflated sense of selfworth back.
So, according to that definition, if these two storms are about to collide, they have to be converging now. So the converging is in the present, the colliding in the fututre. Given what the words mean, there are no temporal issues.
pwned
The storms are not collideing, but they are passing close to each other. During that, it is propable that the smallar storm system is going to loose it red color, in worst case serano the larger storm is going to trow the smaller storm out of his current path. But it is hard to tell for sure what exacly happens, this is a wait and see thing.
wow lol
After the storm calms down, prepare for the biggest fund raise in the whole Solar System!
My mind wandered off to an incest sex orgy for a moment there. :-o
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Will there be an earth shattering kaboom?
Of course not, but that's a popular conspiracy around the internet (2nd etc). Odyssey 2001 featured a 2nd sun made out of Jupiter, presumably by aliens that wanted to populate Europa.
FEMA has 1,300 disaster assistance workers pre-positioned, and re-instated FEMA Director Michael Brown has assured the president they are ready for the storm.
"FEMA is not going to hesitate at all in this storm," Brown said. "We are not going to sit back and make this a bureaucratic process. We are going to move fast, we are going to move quickly and we are going to do whatever it takes to help victims."
-w.a.
You need to look at the broader picture, where is jupiter itself aligned, where are its moons io, europa, etc. positioned. Also where are the rest of the planets? What about the eye on another planet, and is there any confusion going around where some planet may be at currently? Dew note the space shuttle is about to launch, hint hint. Uhm rather the space shuttle is going to the space station to deliver goods and services. Joy.
Personally I say look at all the wonderful things in life on earth, like grass and sunflowers.
Have a great weekend ya'll!
Don't you know? George Bush doesn't like gas people. . .
(argh)Storms are three-dimensional. If the depth varies as the size, then the large spot would actually be as much as eight times larger.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If they don't stop driving their cars and Airconditioning their houses, soon the storms that they created with their wrecklessness will consume the entire population of Jupiterians. - Don't blame me I voted for Kodos
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you."
She could, but perhaps she would spit the earth out.
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
When asked for an opinion on the upcoming collsion, the Great Red Spot had no comment. Oval BA had this to say: "I pity da foo' dat mess wit me! I'm hella bad, and sucka gonna get tossed!"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Depends if the storms have the same depth or not. On earth, they would, so it'd only be 4x. On a gas giant, who knows.
paintball
Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
The problem being that Jupiter does not have a constellation of satellites collecting data 24/7 and a huge number of ground-stations recording weather conditions at regular intervals all round its surface.
Without that data, what would you plug into your simulation, guesses?
Well, hurricane season is underway with a bang!
- Jupiter splits into two smaller, planets
- Jupiter collapses and forms a second sun in our solar system
- Jupiter loses all of it's matter and disappears
You may not think even those are newsworthy, but think back to when that asteroid was heading towards Earth. It neared Jupiter, was pulled in and fell apart. I think Jupiter serves as a protector for the inner planets, and I think it may have been doing this more often and for longer than anyone can conceive.
After reading the story about that asteroid being pulled into Jupiter, I suddenly made a connection to the Roman mythos. Jupiter (Zeus) was the god in charge of protecting (and directing) all of mankind. I know the ancient Greeks and Romans were stargazers, and it makes me wonder if they were able to see events such as an asteroid being "swallowed" by Jupiter.
How many earth-destined bodies has Jupiter saved us from? We know of one that it missed; the one that ended the dinosaurs' reign. Again was this pure happenstance or was it "divine" intervention by Jupiter's course? Is it possible that our monotheistic and polytheistic religions with a prominent "Jupiter" god present are based upon the planet?
Pur conjecture, I admit, but it definitely has me appreciating the outer gas giants. If something happens to Jupiter, Earth is at much greater risk of being hit by a wandering celestial body.
able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin." I heard the same about some of the hiltons.
Flamebait? It's a joke, people!
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I believe the increase in the size of storms on Jupiter is due to global warming, caused by an increased release of greenhouse gases from fuel hungry aliens driving around in their gas guzzling Sports Utility Spaceships (SUSs).
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
This is a very important point. We're talking about a simulation of a chaotic system. It has to be fed ground-truth data - lots of it - on a regular and frequent basis, or it will diverge rather quickly from reality. And with no weather stations, etc, on Jupiter, there's no way to gather the data.
Sean
and this is how denunciation will work once we are all under government surveillance.
Pat Robertson, of the 700 Club, is now saying that both of these storms are a Divine Retribution for the excess and sin of the Jovians. Also, he has advanced syphilis. Film at eleven!
...fuck all.
There is one major difference you seem to disregard in your comparison between Earth and Jupiter. On Earth, we know most of it's topography, we know what it's core, shell, and atomosphere consist of, we know how it spins and the general dynamics of its weather (with some exceptions, of course, but for the most part). With Jupiter, we know very little about it other than what we've been able to speculate. We speculate that it's a still-born star, so we speculate it has a mass similar to that of a small star. From our knowledge of what small stars consist of and what kind of gravity required to keep certain elements in an atomosphere, we can speculate the contents of Jupiter's atomosphere. We've even been able to see the top few layers with The Galileo Project, but the surface, if there is one, is still a mystery. So, not only do we not know what the surface is like, or how it affects the surrounding clouds and storms, but we're not even sure there is a surface. And we certainly don't know if these storms go all the way down to the surface. Who's to say the core even rotates? Or rotates at the same speed or in the same direction as everything else? This one's going out on a limb, I know, but space can already easily break many of the scientific laws that we've established (light itself breaks several of these), so who's to say that what goes on in the depths of a stillborn star goes against everything we consider to be logical?
Meteorologists say that it's practically an unsolvable problem, and that's on a planet which they already know a lot about. With a planet such as Jupiter, there's simply too many unknowns. Everyone knows that the more unknowns you have in a problem, the harder it becomes to solve. The problem here is that, for Jupiter, the problem/formula is almost entirely unknowns.
Yeah, my girlfriend had a cousin like that, too!
Bruce
...your men are already dead.
This has got to be the spot-on evidence we need for Global Warming. See it is all happening right there on Jupiter and is directly correlated with our warming oceans.
Okay, maybe not. But, hey, it sounds good!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
No, and yes, in that order. I am both a nerd and a middle-school dropout.
Was that sarcasm? Sorry if everyone else on /. thinks you are a dumbass and treats you accordingly.
"Previous encounters in 2002 and 2004 were anti-climatic." He means anti-climactic. 'Climatic' means having to do with climate. Which this event is, so it's anything but anti-climatic.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
That's pre-6/6/06 thinking. What you fail to take into account is that the neocons who rule Earth believe in preemptive enforcement of interplanetary law. This may be all happening on Jupiter right now, but once Big Red has eaten Little Red, we're obviously gonna be next! Pictures of these storms, along with a little vial of the same gases that make up Jupiter's atmosphere, are being shown to the U.N. Security Council at this very moment. In the interests of peace, we must declare war on Jupiter!
Where Mr. Bush is concerned, God is too far away to help even if He cared to.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?