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."

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[Lazarian]

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".

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[linuxguy1454]

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.

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[Convector]

Even more odd is the fact that Uranus seems to lack any significant internal heat generation like the other gas giants have. I don't know if the reason for that has ever been resolved.

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[CheshireCatCO]

Holy too much sig. fig., Batman! None of the Great Red Spot,the Great Dark Spot, and the Great White Spot are at 19.5 degrees south latitude on their respective planets. Their latitudes vary around 20 degrees south, but 19.5 is putting way too much precision on it. (If Hoagland insists on being that precise, then you have to accept that the numbers disagree with the data.) Plus, the Great Dark Spot disappeared a while ago. How does that fit in with the theories? And how does he base his prediction on the existence of Sunspots at 19.5 degrees latitude (they exist everywhere up to ~ +/-30 degrees on the Sun) and the "great dark spot" of Uranus which didn't even exist when he claimed to be basing his predictions off of it. (Voyager looked. The planet was basically featureless at that time.)

Really, if you want to go looking at around 19.5 degrees latitude (north or south, which is it?), you're going to find stuff. Especially when you go looking for storms which tend to form in the tropics and when you consider that the majority of the area of the planet lies between + and - 30 degrees latitude.

Hoagland is a crackpot, pure and simple. I invite anyone to go to his site and read his stuff, you'll quickly see what I mean. (He thinks that Iapateus is a dodecaheadron and will split apart, for example.) But he does do fascinating things with Photoshop.

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[linuxguy1454]

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.

Re:Dark Spot on Uranus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what, crazy man?

Grab a tennis ball, put a finger on one spot, then three others anywhere on the ball equidistant from that first finger. Infinite non-equilateral pyramids.