For
the giant planet atmospheres (Jupiter, Saturn), there is an artificial lower boundary, at which drag acts and from which an intrinsic heat flux can emanate.
Liu, J., and T. Schneider, 2015: Scaling of off - equatorial jets in
giant planet atmospheres.
Not exact matches
Jupiter's
atmosphere features colossal cyclones and rivers of ammonia welling up from deep inside the solar system's largest
planet, researchers said on Thursday, publishing the first insights from a NASA spacecraft flying around the gas
giant.
Astronomers this month announced a similar discovery for an even larger gas
giant, reporting that the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, had found that the
planet's rotating cloud belts reach roughly 3,000 kilometers below the top of the
atmosphere.
And they unveil the roots of the
planet's storms, what lies beneath the opaque
atmosphere and a striking geometric layout of cyclones parked around the gas
giant's north and south poles.
FOND FAREWELL The Cassini spacecraft took this last look at the Saturn system two days before plunging into the
giant planet's
atmosphere.
Humanity has just gained its best - ever views of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm large enough to swallow Earth whole that has raged for centuries in the gas -
giant planet's
atmosphere.
This scenario naturally produces a planetary system just like our own: small, rocky
planets with thin
atmospheres close to the star, a Jupiter - like gas
giant just beyond the snowline, and the other
giants getting progressively smaller at greater distances because they move more slowly through their orbits and take longer to hoover up material.
At 3:04 p.m. EDT (12:04 p.m. PDT) on September 11, the spacecraft used a gravitational nudge from Saturn's largest moon to set itself on a collision course with the
giant planet's
atmosphere on September 15.
The first closeup pictures of the
planet's
atmosphere reveal peculiar threadlike clouds and puffy cumulus ones, plus the
giant hurricane first spotted on Saturn in 2008 (SN: 11/8/08, p. 9).
That's when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with the two - ton, bus - size spacecraft as it plunges into the
giant planet's turbulent
atmosphere at more than 122,000 kilometers per hour.
Finally, such observations might help to envisage the distant future of our
planet, when, in 3 or 4 billion years, the Sun will become a red
giant and will circulate in our
atmosphere making life impossible on Earth.
At another extreme, Saturn's
giant moon Titan seems more like a
planet in its own right, larger than Mercury and cloaked in a dense
atmosphere.
The new data also give scientists clues to a long - standing mystery about the
atmospheres of
giant outer
planets.
One lesser known casualty was the Galileo mission to Jupiter, a $ 1 billion NASA spacecraft designed to orbit the
giant planet, study its many moons and drop a probe into its
atmosphere.
Carbon monoxide is a major constituent of the
atmospheres of
giant planets.
Hu developed a method of studying exoplanet
atmospheres and surfaces, and had previously only applied it to sizzling,
giant gaseous
planets called hot Jupiters.
Although scientists suspect that the extended
atmospheres of young
giant planets can capture passing bodies, «the origin of these moons is still a mystery,» says Luu, who was not a member of the discovery team, «But [the large number of moons] is an important clue that tells us the process must have been very efficient,» says Luu.
And because they are almost as cold as «gas
giant»
planets — Jupiter is about 150 K — studying them could offer a better handle on what the
atmospheres of alien worlds look like.
If it were a gas
giant the size of Jupiter, part of its
atmosphere would actually be inside the gravitational destruction zone, and the
planet would not have survived long enough for Bailes's team to detect it.
The star's intense light and heat would evaporate the gas
giant's
atmosphere at a rate of up to 10 million tonnes per second, which may render the
planet a naked core by the time its star expands and envelops it.
Like Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS), the storm swirls in an anti-cyclonic direction and is dredging up material from deep inside the ice
giant planet's
atmosphere.
The Daedalus solution was to harvest the fuel from gas -
giant planets like Jupiter, by building and operating a fleet of balloon - borne robotic extraction factories in their
atmospheres.
«We have a spacecraft inside the
atmosphere of a
giant planet for the first time.
Water is not only a key ingredient in supporting life, it's also a major clue as to how
planets form, and NASA has found a lot of the stuff in the
atmosphere of a
giant exoplanet called Wasp - 39b.
As this SWRI press release details, Juno has eight scientific instruments designed to study the
planet's magnetic field,
atmosphere and interior structure, and they show that Jupiter is far more than just a
giant ball of gases.
Maunakea, Hawaii - When NASA's Cassini spacecraft plunges into the
atmosphere of Saturn on Sept. 15, ending its 20 years of exploration, astronomers will observe the
giant planet from Earth, giving context to Cassini's final measurements.
«Along with the microwave radiometer measurements, which have also shown surprises in the deep
atmosphere, these results demonstrate that if we want to understand
giant planets, we will need to study all of Jupiter,» Levin says.
Called «NASA's Leadership and America's Future in Space,» the report said that studying the outer gas
giant planets (such as Saturn) help scientists learn about their
atmospheres and internal structure.
I'm still holding out for the news that reads: «Second Earth Found» -[this exoplanet] will have all the right ingredients: orbit its star inside the habitable zone, spectroscopic analysis will reveal a nitrogen - rich
atmosphere, evidence of water, roughly the same mass as our
planet and it will belong in a system with a couple of gas
giants shepherding the outer system.
Many of these are much larger than Earth — ranging from large
planets with thick
atmospheres, like Neptune, to gas
giants like Jupiter — or in orbits so close to their stars that they are roasted.
Maps of water in the
planet's
atmosphere reveal that as much as one - fifth of the
planet could have been covered by a
giant body of water, but now, it is gone.
«The composition and chemistry of ice
giant atmospheres provides clues about their formation, evolution and current state,» explained a research paper referenced as part of NASA's Outer
Planets Assessment Group Meeting in Laurel, Maryland.
These observations represent the first constraints on the atmospheric dynamics of a highly irradiated brown dwarf, and the
atmospheres of irradiated
giant planets at high surface gravity.
Despite being nearly three times as massive as Jupiter, the new
planet (KELT - 9b) is only half as dense as the gas
giant, as the radiation from its host star has caused its
atmosphere to expand, the authors said.
The techniques used to study the
atmospheres of these
giant planets will one day help scientists determine the habitability of Earth - sized exoplanets.
«From the strength of the absorption,» she says, it appears «the
planet's
atmosphere has a composition not dissimilar to those of the
giant planets of our solar system.»
Spectroscopic studies that rely on variations in the depth of the transit with wavelength have been used to identify gases such as hydrogen, sodium, and methane in the upper
atmospheres of some close - in
giant planets.
The
planet should be rocky — life as we know it can not exist on a gas
giant, for example — it needs an
atmosphere capable of supporting life and it should be in the habitable zone of the solar system.
1:20 PM Liu - Abundance Studies of Stellar Hosts of Terrestrial
Planets 1:40 PM Kitiashvili - 3D Realistic Modeling of Stellar Convection as a Tool to Study Effects of Stellar Jitter on RV Measurements 2:00 PM Crossfield -
Planet Densities (invited) 2:30 PM Break and Poster Viewing 3:00 PM Guyon - Coronagraphs for Planet Detection (invited) 3:30 PM Martins - Exoplanet Reflections in the era of Giant Telescopes 3:50 PM Close - Direct Detection of Exoplanets with GMT AO: A proof of concept design for a GMT Phase A ExAO planet imager 4:10 PM Direct Imaging Discussion - Led by Jared Males 5:20 PM End of meeting for the day 5:30 PM Buses depart for Monterey Bay Aquarium 6:00 PM Conference Banquet Wednesday, September 28 7:30 - 9:00 AM Breakfast 9:00 AM Lewis - JWST - ELT Synergy (invited) 9:30 AM Greene - Characterizing exoplanet atmospheres with JWST 9:50 AM Morzinski - Breaking degeneracies in understanding fundamental exoplanet properties with ELTs 10:10 AM Break and Poster Viewing 11:00 AM Cotton - Detecting Clouds in Hot Jupiters with Linear Polarisation 11:20 AM Boss - S
Planet Densities (invited) 2:30 PM Break and Poster Viewing 3:00 PM Guyon - Coronagraphs for
Planet Detection (invited) 3:30 PM Martins - Exoplanet Reflections in the era of Giant Telescopes 3:50 PM Close - Direct Detection of Exoplanets with GMT AO: A proof of concept design for a GMT Phase A ExAO planet imager 4:10 PM Direct Imaging Discussion - Led by Jared Males 5:20 PM End of meeting for the day 5:30 PM Buses depart for Monterey Bay Aquarium 6:00 PM Conference Banquet Wednesday, September 28 7:30 - 9:00 AM Breakfast 9:00 AM Lewis - JWST - ELT Synergy (invited) 9:30 AM Greene - Characterizing exoplanet atmospheres with JWST 9:50 AM Morzinski - Breaking degeneracies in understanding fundamental exoplanet properties with ELTs 10:10 AM Break and Poster Viewing 11:00 AM Cotton - Detecting Clouds in Hot Jupiters with Linear Polarisation 11:20 AM Boss - S
Planet Detection (invited) 3:30 PM Martins - Exoplanet Reflections in the era of
Giant Telescopes 3:50 PM Close - Direct Detection of Exoplanets with GMT AO: A proof of concept design for a GMT Phase A ExAO
planet imager 4:10 PM Direct Imaging Discussion - Led by Jared Males 5:20 PM End of meeting for the day 5:30 PM Buses depart for Monterey Bay Aquarium 6:00 PM Conference Banquet Wednesday, September 28 7:30 - 9:00 AM Breakfast 9:00 AM Lewis - JWST - ELT Synergy (invited) 9:30 AM Greene - Characterizing exoplanet atmospheres with JWST 9:50 AM Morzinski - Breaking degeneracies in understanding fundamental exoplanet properties with ELTs 10:10 AM Break and Poster Viewing 11:00 AM Cotton - Detecting Clouds in Hot Jupiters with Linear Polarisation 11:20 AM Boss - S
planet imager 4:10 PM Direct Imaging Discussion - Led by Jared Males 5:20 PM End of meeting for the day 5:30 PM Buses depart for Monterey Bay Aquarium 6:00 PM Conference Banquet Wednesday, September 28 7:30 - 9:00 AM Breakfast 9:00 AM Lewis - JWST - ELT Synergy (invited) 9:30 AM Greene - Characterizing exoplanet
atmospheres with JWST 9:50 AM Morzinski - Breaking degeneracies in understanding fundamental exoplanet properties with ELTs 10:10 AM Break and Poster Viewing 11:00 AM Cotton - Detecting Clouds in Hot Jupiters with Linear Polarisation 11:20 AM Boss - Summary
Their
atmospheres can be similar to the
giant planet Jupiter's.
All the
giant planets and some moons and comets have methane in their
atmospheres, so — for the same reasons — they may have (or had) life in the form of bacteria.
CoRoT - 7 b, the first potential rocky
planet detected outside the Solar system, may be the remnant core of a Saturn - mass gas
giant that had its
atmosphere and lower gas metal layers burned off (more)
What remains to be found among the
Giant Planets like Jupiter and Saturn are some candidates that combine all three ingredients for primitive life: energy, liquid water and some
atmosphere.
The
giant meteorite dubbed Christmas Star hit the Earth and turned our
planet's
atmosphere into Beijing - level smog.
BD +48 740, a red
giant they observed using the 9.2 - meter Hobby - Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, appears to have the fumes of a scorched
planet in its
atmosphere.
Some scientists there told me that Dr. Glantz's little team was always kind of a bad fit, given the main focus of the lab on physical sciences, and particularly on refining
giant simulations run on supercomputers to try to mimic the interrelated workings of the
planet's
atmosphere, oceans, and frozen zones.
-- Smith et al., 2007 https://search.proquest.com/openview/cba4766420ef04f09227ccf861784a90/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40569 The upper
atmospheres of the four Solar System
giant planets exhibit high temperatures that can not be explained by the absorption of sunlight.
The simulations resolve the flow in the upper
atmospheres of the
giant planets, with implicit links to the (convective) flow, mean meridional circulations and (likely magnetohydrodynamic) dissipation mechanisms at depth.
-- Back to Jupiter: the planetary structure of Jupiter is so different from that of the rocky
planets that Jupiter & it's similar neighbor Saturn are called «gas
giants», in some ways something like stars in that their
atmospheres producing power.