Yes, Sky Candy is late this week. Lots of reasons — I’m moving into my new place is a big one — but PJ was kind of overwhelmed with content, so I delayed. I expect to be back on schedule next Friday. The theme this week is Jupiter, by Jupiter or about Jupiter,
Jupiter is a big bully. Pushes everyone else around. But Jupiter may also have saved life on Warth, by cleaning up the asteroids and pushing them into the asteroid belt. Or maybe instead it pushed them toward Earth as lunar buckshot.
Since it’s out in the outer solar system, at least from an Earth point of view, we naturally think of it as cold, and icy moons like Ganymede just encourage that. But here’s a picture of Jupiter taken in infrared.
I’ve said it before — until we started getting pictures from the Juno probe, I kind of thought Jupiter was a little, well, boring. Stripes and a Red Spot, and a limit to how much there was to see.
Wrong.
I would love to know what wild chemicals are in the Jovian atmosphere to make all these colors. The best hypothesis is trace amounts of chemicals like sulphur and phosphorus, but I suspect until we get a closer look, say with a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere, we won’t know. Prediction: it’s more complicated than that.
With a wild idea that I think I thought of first: it might be Jovian life.
Of course, Arthur C Clarke thought of life in Jupiter too, in “A Meeting With Medusa” and Poul Anderson wrote a really good story about it (“Call me Joe”), but I think I’m the first to suggest it could be the reason for the colors.
Jupiter has an interesting neighborhood too. Here are Europa and I’m passing by Jupiter. Europa and lo, along with Ganymede and Callisto, are known as the Galilean moons, because they were first seen by Galileo. Here they are.
Jupiter and its 4 Largest Moons glowing in the Night-sky. Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto on the left, Io on the right side. 🌌
— Physics-astronomy.org (@OrgPhysics) March 5, 2023
Image by: Luis Argerich pic.twitter.com/FmPcCgxDej
I wanted to make sure to get a picture of Callisto in to complete the set, but there aren’t nearly as many pictures of Callisto. Still, found one.
Callisto's anti-Jovian hemisphere imaged in 2001 by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. It shows a heavily cratered terrain. pic.twitter.com/1mt4A42ywV
— Space Explorer Mike (@MichaelGalanin) November 11, 2018
Seeing that Jupiter had its own moons, as well as Saturn’s “ears” that we now know were the first observation of the Rings, is a big part of what got Galileo in trouble with the Church.
“Nonetheless, it still moves.”
Io in particular is, well, exciting. Jupiter’s gravity is beating it up, and you can see the bruises. The internal heating from the effect of Jupiter’s gravity has made Io the most volcanic place in the Solar System.
It’s not quite Io, but Europa is much more interesting than it used to seem. It pretty clearly has liquid water under the surface, and I’ll repeat my utterly-unfalsifiable prediction: where there is liquid water, there’s life.
Oh, and remember: all those worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Jupiter does everything big, the Texas of the Solar System. It has a big magnetic field, which directs particles from the solar wind into the poles. That means big aurorae.
And speaking of aurorae, they can be pretty flashy even here. Yeah, it’s not Jupiter but I wanted to squeeze this one in.
Aurora from Djúpivogur, Iceland 🌌 pic.twitter.com/SakYWoXqzM
— Space 8K (@uhd2020) December 28, 2024
So that does it for this week. Next week, I’m going to go for more nebulas. Do please leave a comment if there’s anything you’d like to be a theme in the future.
