Well, yesterday was my birthday, and so the planet Jupiter (along with the Hubble Space Telescope) obligingly delivered a cool gift (not just to me, of course): a picture of a new “Great Red Spot” forming on the planet Jupiter. It turns out that, just like there’s climate change going on here on our planet, Jupiter’s giant and stormy atmosphere is undergoing change, too. Global warming on the King of the Planets, however, will raise temps there about 10 degrees F. Heat will get transferred from the equator to the south pole, although that movement of heat lessens as it reaches the latitude of the new spot. So, there’s a clue in there somewhere about the dynamics of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Stay tuned!
Stardust arrives at the cleanroom after its interplanetary journey.
Dust from interplanetary space is a treasure trove of information about the “stuff” between planets. Those little particles, many of them shed by comets as they regularly round the Sun, give us some tantalizing hints about what things were like early in the history of the solar system.
That’s why a group of scientists sent a mission out to sweep a little bit of cosmic dust into an aerogel “dust collector” and bring it back to Earth for study. They hope to get some insights into the materials that existed some 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets and comets formed. Comets themselves are bigger treasure troves, carrying ices and gases left over from the chaotic conditions in the early solar system. They also have dust particles embedded in between the ice crystals. That dust might have been shed by a long-dead star as it was blowing itself to smithereens as a supernova.
I always find these missions interesting. We can’t go out for ourselves and scoop up interplanetary dust, but we can send out these amazing pieces of technology to do it for us. And, each time we reach out, we touch a piece of cosmic history. Very cool!
For more cool thoughts about the Stardust mission, visit their web page.
Finally, if you’ve tuned in for more cosmic headlines from the AAS, here you go! Happy reading!
