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Hubble Discovers Dark Spot on Uranus
TheDawgLives writes "Just as we near the end of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, winds whirl and clouds churn 2 billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, forming a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States."
Uranus is different from the other planets in the fact its axis is tilted almost ninety degrees - for two periods of its 84 year orbit one half of the planet is always pointed away from the sun. From the picture it looks like right now its equator is perpendicular towards sunward. Even though its distance means it would recieve little solar heat, it does have a large surface area. I would think that right now any heat would be more or less evenly distributed because of its rotation. But it would be interesting to see if heat transport would make the atmosphere more violent when one side of the planet is always bathed in sunlight while the other is in the dark, about twenty years from now. Maybe Uranus might have violent/calm /violent phases as it travels around the sun during its "year".
OK, time to salvage this from all the jokes.
From the image, it looks like the spot could be 19.5 degrees north of the equator. Years ago, I read a paper by Richard C. Hoagland, author of The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (1987). Although a lot of his paper seemed like wild speculation to me, I remember one "message" he deduced from the so-called area near the "face on Mars." There is a characteristic of planetary dynamics which produces an anomoly at 19.5 degrees north or south lattitude, depending on the magnetic pole of the planet. This is related to the rotating molten core of the planet.
Jupiter's famous red spot is a 19.5 deg. south lattitude. Hoagland predicted a spot on Neptune at 19.5 degrees lattitude before the Voyager discovered it. On earth, Hawaii's Mona Loa volcano, the world's largest and continuously active volcano, is at 19.5 deg. north lattitude. (The Hawaiian islands were all made by passing over the spot where Mona Loa is now.) Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, is at 19.5 deg lattitude. The "face on Mars" is 1/3 of the way around from Olympus Mons, at 19.5 deg. lattitude.
So the spot on Uranus (not on mine!) has nothing to do with solar energy. It is an artifact of planetary dynamics.
As an additional note- if you place a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) inside a shpere so that it's tip touches the north pole and it's 3 base points touch the insides of the sphere, they touch at 19.5 degrees south lattitude.
Hoagland doesn't explain the 19.5 degree thing, he basically says that it seems to be a result of unexplained planetary dynamics for which nobody seems to have a theory for. What is more weird than the 19.5 thing is how he claims to have figured it out, be we won't go into that. The pyramid thing is just an attempt by him to provide some sort of mathematical law expressed in geometric terms that appears to be related to these unknown planetary dynamics. Like using geometric principals to explain Keplar's orbit theory. There are lots of physical phenomena that are defined by mathamatics. Why does E = M * C^2? Why F = M * a? It's just the way Mother Nature made it. It's that way so that the universe all fits together, I guess.