Dragon Storm Sunday, Sep 2 2007
space 10:04 pm
Above is an image of a fantastic Dragon Storm. It is a large, bright and complex storm in Saturn’s southern hemisphere, named for its unusual shape. If you look closely you can see hints of it extending for many thousands of kilometers to the north.
My naive hypothesis is these artefacts are too big to be merely weather phenomenon. Instead I could envision that these things are instead residual forms of earlier impacts. Imagine an asteroid falling into these clouds, how long would that produce fallout? My guess is a steadily sinking pile of debris, slowly tumbling down in lower strata, could very well leave telltale signs in the higher atmosphere of gaseous planets, in the form of welling up cloud with different compositions, radiated waste heat. Even though there are perfecly good explanations for say, the red spot of jupiter, I could also anticipate such a feature being the result of a small moonlet that tumbled into the clouds of jupiter, scattered into a pile of pulp, and is slowly sinking down in the bowels of Jupiter, creating a massive localized stink.
Mind you, I used the word hypothesis. Anyone who is eager to test or falsify it, feel free.
“My naive hypothesis is these artefacts are too big to be merely weather phenomenon.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot
“Imagine an asteroid falling into these clouds, how long would that produce fallout? My guess is a steadily sinking pile of debris, slowly tumbling down in lower strata,”
It would vaporize on impact, creating a shock front of very hot plasma (also known as an explosion). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoemaker-Levy_9.
Well yah, I am aware of what the Red spot is, probably been for decades, but my idea above is just a wild hypothesis.
When something big falls into a gas giant, I mean sure it’ll transform all that juicy kinetic energy into like something vaporous, sure, but hey, that dust won’t all just vanish right? It’ll rain down, probably as some sort of soot.
Can you imagine a small moon, few miles across, rain down as soot and slowly percolate into the depths of the atmosphere, until it sinks and well, disperses into the underlying metalized substrate? That sinking down process must be an energetic affair, right? Miles of powdered rock, even when vaporized, sinking down into a sea of liquid hydrogen, it won’t just go *burp* and be gone? Maybe it’ll become a giant smear very quickly, but an actual moon, it’s gotta leave some kind of imprint in the blubber. How long will a small moon last sinking down? Could be thousands of years or more. Maybe millions. The sinking down, creation of complex molecules, heat diffusion, hey I can see how that has a lasting effect on the clouds overhead.
Sure shoemaker levy wasn’t even an asteroid. It was a pearl necklace of fragments, but even *that* caused a blast that would have sterilized earth down to the oceanic trenches ! Sure, such a small object wouldn’t even sink down in one piece, its matter be blown away like autumn leaves. But how often is Jupiter or Saturn smacked by something big?
Might be often, a small asteroid every few decennia like? Small moon or so, KBO or something, every million years?
I’d love to see a computer simulation that shows how quickly such a mass “boils away” in the atmosphere, something like sugar in a cup of tea… Maybe the analogue might be more like a chuck of motor grease in a big aquarium filled with light motor oil. At this stage, who knows how bad the relative viscosity works. It’s hard to have a decent intuition in such scales.
“It’ll rain down, probably as some sort of soot.”
No, it won’t; it’ll get vaporized into a plasma. Dust moving at 60 km/s has roughly 1.8 GJ/kg of kinetic energy, which is five hundred times more energy than the same mass of TNT and one hundred times the energy needed to vaporize it.
“Can you imagine a small moon, few miles across, rain down as soot”
Even on Earth, the collision of an asteroid vaporizes several times the mass of that asteroid. Why do you think we haven’t mined Meteor Crater for the asteroid’s minerals? There’s nothing left, it was all vaporized.
“Maybe it’ll become a giant smear very quickly, but an actual moon, it’s gotta leave some kind of imprint in the blubber.”
The marks Shoemaker-Levy 9 left on Jupiter lasted for over a month.
“How long will a small moon last sinking down? Could be thousands of years or more. Maybe millions.”
If you take a giant pile of rock massing several thousand billion metric tons, and hurl it into a cloud of thick gaseous soup at a hundred times the speed of sound, it will not peacefully “sink down”; it will create an explosion.
“It was a pearl necklace of fragments, but even *that* caused a blast that would have sterilized earth down to the oceanic trenches !”
The original SL9 comet was almost certainly smaller than the dino-killer asteroid.
“I’d love to see a computer simulation that shows how quickly such a mass “boils away” in the atmosphere,”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2q5KkO10E
Anyway the point is that Khannea was making a hypothesis. Thanks for your hypothesis, it is appreciated. Tom tears apart everything, don’t feel bad. ;)
“Tom tears apart everything, don’t feel bad. :-)”
We need more tearers like Tom. He criticizes, but does so in a civil manner. And he’s willing to honestly consider counter-arguments and won’t instead just argue ad infinitum, to shield his pride. He’s the scourge of incomplete reasoning.
Which is why Tom is invaluable…!