[223/365] the flag of Jupiter

[cosmolinguist]

No you've been staring at this animation of Jupiter's current cloud structures, compiled from Hubble data.

But I still can't decide if I like to look at it better when it's like that or in its original stretched-out flat form.

It looks like a flag!

I saw this when I was reading about how we are likely living in the last days of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

I mean, in astronomical terms. It isn't likely to disappear tomorrow, but it's already significantly smaller than it was when Voyager saw it in 1979. As a kid I read about how we know how old the Great Red Spot is because it didn't used to be there: the idea that the solar system was changing just in the time since we invented telescopes to look at it seemed pretty cool to me. Still does. And yet the Great Red Spot was as much a fixture of drawings and models of our familiar planets as are the rings or Saturn (which it turns out also probably haven't always been there, albeit they're existing on a much grander timescale than any specific storm on Jupiter).

It's funny the things we take for granted. Maybe kids now won't think Jupiter has a red spot any more than they think Pluto is a planet.

Comments

[raino]

Lucky timing for us humans! I'm also amazed by the good luck we have that Moon and Sun appear to be the same size and so eclipses are really spectacular. Moon is slipping further away and in some time it's not covering the whole disk of Sun anymore from Earth vantage point.

[cosmolinguist]

I have a friend who needed to get some school qualifications; they were telling me they had to decide between taking biology, chemistry and physics. "I like biology because it's squishy and gross," they told me, "and chemistry's cool because it's explosions. But I don't like physics."

I protested that physics is great, it's my favorite, I love it. My friend challenged me to tell them one cool thing about physics. I told them this one, about the Moon being 400 times closer than the Sun but the Sun being 400 times further away so they look the same size and therefore eclipses.

My friend admitted that this was really cool, which was more than I'd expected so I was really proud of myself.

[finding_helena]

I watched an episode of Storybots with my kids the other day and it was about the planets. It featured Pluto being resentful that it was no longer considered a planet even though it had been in the past.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh man! They're gonna give all the kids this same complex about Pluto that my fellow millennials have.

Between "Pluto is a planet" and "dinosaurs don't have feathers," I feel like our grade school science classes left a huge impression on us in terms of Facts Learned, but a lot less when it comes to changing our ideas when new evidence is discovered. :)

[miss_s_b]

Pluto is still a planet in my heart.

[cosmolinguist]

My feelings on Pluto are that it is the ugly duckling of the solar system and it deserves to be a queer icon for having been so shit at being a planet and making so much more sense now that we understand it as the Kuiper Belt Object it has been all along. :)

[miss_s_b]

Pluto the Queer icon? I am there for that.

[silveradept]

Geologic timescales man that things humans take for granted are actually in good, but it's a question of whether you are (un)lucky enough to learn that firsthand.