Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 12 May 2024

Taken: 12 May 2024

4 favorites     4 comments    12 visits

See also...

Keywords

Image & Excerpt •
CHAOS •
Making a New Science •
Author •
James Gleick •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved
12 visits

this photo by Dinesh

The Great Red Spot: Real and simulated. The Voyager satellite revealed Jupiter’s surface as a seething, turbulent fluid, with horizontal bands of east-west flow. He Great Red spot is seen from above the planet’s equator and also in a view looking down on the South pole

Günter Diel, Fred Fouarge, Malik Raoulda, Paolo Tanino have particularly liked this photo

Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
A modest cosmic mystery: the Great Red spot of Jupiter, a vast, swirling oval, like a giant storm that never moves and never runs down. Anyone who saw the pictures beamed across space from Voyager 2 in 1978 recognizes the familiar look of turbulence on a hugely unfamiliar scale. It was one of the solar system’s most venerable landmarks – “the red spot roaring like an anguished eye amid a turbulence of boiling eyebrows,” as John Updike described it. But what was it? Twenty years after Lorenz, Smale, and other scientists set in motion a new way of understanding nature’s flows, the other-worldly weather of Jupiter proved to be one of the many problems awaiting the altered sense of nature’s possibilities that came with science of Chaos.

For three centuries it had been a case of the more you know, the less you know astronomers noiced a blemist on the great planet not long after Galileo first pointed his telescopes at Jupiter. Robert Hooke saw it in the 1699s. Donati Creti painted it in the Vatican’s picture gallery. As a piece of coloration, the spot called for little explaining. But telescopes got better, and knowledge bred ignorance. The last century produced a steady march of theories one on the heels of another.

Then came the Voyager. Most astronomers thought the mystery would give way as soon as they could look closely enough. . . . . The spacecraft pictures in 1978 revealed powerful winds and colorful eddies. In spectacular detail, astronomers saw the spot itself as a hurricane-like system of swirling flow, shoving aside the clouds, embedded tin zones of east-west wind that made horizontal stripes around the planet. . . . Hurricanes rotate in a cyclonic direction, counterclockwise about the Equator and clockwise below, like all earthly storms; the Red Spot’s rotation is anticyclonic. And most important, hurricanes die out within days.

Also as astronomers studied the Voyager pictures, they realized that the planet was virtually all fluid in motion. They had been conditioned to look for a solid planet surrounded by a paper-thin atmosphere like earth’s, but if Jupiter had a solid core anywhere, it was far from the surface. The planet suddenly looked like one big fluid dynamics experiment, and there saw the Red Spot, turning steadily around and around, thoroughly upper-turbulence by the chaos around it. ~ Pages 53 / 54

CHAOS
3 weeks ago. Edited 3 weeks ago.
 Malik Raoulda
Malik Raoulda club
Un remarquable et intéressant partage bien révélateur et très évocateur..
Bonne et heureuse semaine paisible et reposante.
3 weeks ago.
 TOZ
TOZ club
Very Interesting Dinesh lots of information.
Have a good week.
TOZ
3 weeks ago.
 Loose_Grip/Pete
Loose_Grip/Pete club
A planet consisting of mainly fluid. Amazing!
3 weeks ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.