Jupiter Gets New Red Spot 141
saskboy writes "The planet Jupiter is growing a new red spot. Jupiter is already well known for its Great Red Spot storm which is visible through modest backyard telescopes, so it will be interesting if this newer spot sticks around and grows. From the article: 'The official name of this storm is Oval BA, but Red Jr. might be better. It's about half the size of the famous Great Red Spot and almost exactly the same color. Oval BA first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. A similar merger centuries ago may have created the original Great Red Spot, a storm twice as wide as our planet and at least 300 years old.'"
Re:I'm betting it is herpes (Score:5, Informative)
A careless copy-paste from Google (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Old? Not really. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Life on Jupiter? (Score:4, Informative)
Now, there are levels of Jupiter's atmosphere where more complex and useful molecules are likely, due to pressure and lots of available components. Methane, for example, or other useful hydrocarbons that would have some energy to release and could be used for fuel in various interactions should be quite popular at some levels of that very deep atmosphere. And there are some fascinating proposals for how life could eveolve there. But please actually look them up, and maybe take a basic chemistry course to learn about what "using something for energy" means about the chemicals involved.
Re:Atmosphere probe? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, Titan's orbit is filled by a toroidal cloud of hydrogen much of what does escape is reabsorbed by the moon itself. Sky and Telescope had a good article about it a decade or two ago.
A bit of Earth's atmosphere blows out into space as well. Apollo 16 brought back some nice UV photos of the Earth's hydrogen corona, caused by splitting of H20 molecules in the upper atmosphere by UV light. The hydrogen is eventually lost to space but not at a rate that we have to worry about losing our oceans soon... at least not to evaporation.