
Jupiter is deep - rbanffy
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/whoa-like-jupiter-is-deep-really-really-deep
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bwang29
One thing that might not be related but I found fascinating is that Jupiter is
“木星” in Chinese, where “木” means wooden. The first time “木星” was mentioned in
Chinese literature was in 东汉, year 25 - year 220 (around 1800 years ago). So
Chinese people back then thought the planet was made of wood! And as a child,
this planet has the name easiest to remember, because it looks exactly like a
wooden ball.

Edit: I digged deeper and found that it was a coincidence that Jupiter was
called the Wooden Planet. The Chinese assigned the name not because they were
able to observe the wood like texture (due to the lack of telescope), but they
were able to observe the existence of the planet with naked eye as early as
2300 years ago, along with the Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn. These five
planets were assigned to the name in the order of "金 gold (Venus)","木 wood
(Jupiter)","水 water (Mercury)","火 fire (Mars)"."土 rock (Saturn)"
superstitiously. What's really surprising is Venus does look like gold in
color and Saturn does look like wood in color. What a coincidence!

~~~
lopmotr
Not an interesting coincidence. Jupiter is hot but Mars gets named fire.
Mercury looks like rock (thin atmosphere) but Saturn get called rock. You
could find some reason to make almost any naming seem like a coincidence.

~~~
gisely
Not interesting to who? Coincidences can interesting even if they don't point
to a causal relationship. I find it interesting that word for Jupiter in
Chinese is wood simply because it's an interesting association to make.

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pure_ambition
Jupiter is so cool.

Fun fact, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a huge storm that has been raging for at
least 188 years if not much longer. It also has a diameter about 2-3 times as
wide as Earth’s.

Jupiter also is believed to be a gravitational shield that protects us from
asteroids and comets.

Jupiter is also Home to some of the coolest Moons in our solar system, my
favorites being Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede (the Galilean moons), in
that order.

One question I’ve always had and hope to learn one day: what the heck is
Jupiter’s “surface” like? I know it’s believe to be essentially layers of
metallic hydrogen, but what the heck does that even mean? What would it look
like? So interesting.

~~~
dperfect
It might not exactly answer your question, but you may enjoy this description
of what it would be like to fall into Jupiter:

[https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5041](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5041)

~~~
ghostDancer
Thanks, that link is fantastic, informative and entertaining at the same time.

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vanderZwan
Somehow, I knew this was Phil Plait from the title. Love his stuff. And this
reminded me that I forgot to migrate my RSS feeds with Phil Plait to his new
blog location. Thanks!

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pwaivers
The renderings are amazing looking! It makes Jupiter looks like an evil
planet.

~~~
craftyguy
Those aren't renderings, they are composite images made from photographs taken
of Jupiter using an infrared camera on the Juno spacecraft.

~~~
Godel_unicode
What word would you use for composite false-color images produced by a
computer if not "renderings"?

~~~
craftyguy
computer "renderings" has a very specific meaning, creating images from 2D or
3D models.

I would call this a 'composite image.'

~~~
Godel_unicode
You might wish to check out the below Wikipedia page, specifically the section
titled "types of color renderings"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color)

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matte_black
Sometimes I wonder how different our world might be if it were the size of
Jupiter but at the surface still had the same gravity we have now.

It could take days to download something from the other side of the planet.
And probably a month of airplane travel just to get there.

~~~
new299
Latency would be higher, and might make phone calls a little awkward perhaps?,
but it shouldn't make any longer to download a file. You might want to modify
protocols so they send acknowledgements less often, or use larger packets
perhaps.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Exactly this. It's always amazing to me how latency gets confused with
bandwidth.

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throwaway0255
Really interesting content but this site has one of the most aggressive,
unpredictable and annoying slide-down headers I've ever seen.

Displaying written content on the web should be so simple, yet all the content
producers have invented their own special blend of ways to fuck it up.

Slide-down headers. Share links widgets that overlap content. Video plays
without asking and follows you down the page. Entire page lags while 800
javascript snippets load. Text is some stylish but unreadable low-contrast
color. Modals begging you for your email.

I manually edit the DOM and CSS of sites on an almost daily basis now just so
I can read it.

~~~
pavlov
It's a real shame how HTML completely screwed up the "markup" part by not
offering a separate API for UI chrome. If Netscape had offered some way to
define navigation separately from the textual content, it might still have
saved us. Now it's all just a jumble: documents that describe UI views that
describe document fragments that describe UI controls.

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mnemotronic
I do glassblowing as a hobby. I'd like to replicate some of the patterns in
those pics in glass. Might have to deviate from the color spectrum in the
pictures. The reds I use are nowhere near as intense.

~~~
ljf
Please post a 'Show HN' if you ever do! I'd love to see the process and
results and maybe even buy one! What an amazing piece of art it would be.

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v_lisivka
> There's a single Southern Polar Cyclone (the SPC in this case), but only
> five cyclones around it! They're bigger too, and are different sizes,
> ranging from 5,600 to 7,000 km across. Again, it's not clear why the poles
> are different. The fact that there are fewer in the south and they're bigger
> may be related (I'm guessing, but if you have fewer they can grow to fill
> more space … ?), but no one really knows.

Maybe because the main cyclone escaped the South pole and now known as Big Red
Spot?

~~~
rocqua
That would mean 7 southern cyclones accounted for. This is still different
from the 9 on the northern pole.

~~~
v_lisivka
Maybe because central cyclone merged 2 side cyclones, so it has extra energy
to escape South pole.

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Double_Cast
So... do astronomers _truly_ have no idea why the 9 polar cyclones don't
combine? I can't imagine what mechanism might prevent this.

~~~
crygin
It's a relatively common phenomenon in hydrodynamics (specifically, the
formation of large separated cyclones in unstable flow), and the best
explanation is delightful -- Onsager's "The Little Vortices Who Wanted To
Play" (a letter to Linus Pauling, reproduced on page 33 of this PDF:
[http://bactra.org/sloth/eyink-and-sreenivasan-on-onsager-
on-...](http://bactra.org/sloth/eyink-and-sreenivasan-on-onsager-on-
turbulence.pdf) ).

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bufferoverflow
Isn't it pointless to ask _why_ a chaotic turbulent system ended up this
particular way? The author keeps repeating this question (or stating "nobody
knows"), as if there's some fundamental and interesting answer to it.

~~~
madavidj
I'm not sure if you're playing with words here, but asking questions like
these is the most natural way to discover more about physics itself. Of course
studying Jupyter is not as fundamental as studying particle physics or string
theory, but it's an emergent physics that nobody has fully explored yet.

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pvaldes
At least is a twisted planet, that's for sure.

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bitwize
The polar cyclone systems look like Magic Roundabouts.

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euler_
Why the title change?

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tritium
Hey, neat!

Jupiter almost has an octagon on it's north pole (and nearly a pentagonal
version on it's south pole), similar to Saturn's northern polar hexagon!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon)

[1] [https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=1930](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=1930)

~~~
BLanen
Well, that was mentioned in the article too.

~~~
tritium
Yes, and now you’ve mentioned that it was mentioned in the article. So here we
are, mentioning things.

