Jupiter's Lightning May Have the Force of Nuclear Weapons (science.org) 16
How powerful is Jupiter's lightning? Thick clouds cover the view, notes Science magazine. But using an instrument on NASA's Juno spacecraft (orbiting Jupiter for the past decade), researchers determined Jupiter's lightning bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than earth's:
A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute...
The four storms Juno studied were monstrous, says Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the study's authors. There were three flashes per second on average, often emerging from the hearts of storms that are 3000 kilometers across, longer than the distance from New York City to Denver.
The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope (and photographs from Juno's camera) to track Jupiter's storms with such precision that their radiometer could then pick out individual lightning flashes, according to the article. "It's just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that there's very energetic lightning happening," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasn't involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions "is exciting," he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistry — including the sort that primordial life is built on.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.
The four storms Juno studied were monstrous, says Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the study's authors. There were three flashes per second on average, often emerging from the hearts of storms that are 3000 kilometers across, longer than the distance from New York City to Denver.
The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope (and photographs from Juno's camera) to track Jupiter's storms with such precision that their radiometer could then pick out individual lightning flashes, according to the article. "It's just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that there's very energetic lightning happening," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasn't involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions "is exciting," he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistry — including the sort that primordial life is built on.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.
Change of Plans (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent funny but I can't concur because I have no bucket list and my fsck-it list has overflowed its bucket.
Still an interesting place to read about, though this story reminds me of an old article in Scientific American before the Germans bought it. Using large arrays of microphones in Houston they tracked the paths of individual lightning strikes. Pretty sure that was when they learned that most of it is cloud-to-cloud... (Two AI's agree over 75%. Trust no single AI? (Cue the married to an AI joke?))
Metric, but not quite (Score:1)
This is a tangent, but am I the only one who gets annoyed when people fail to use the most appropriate SI prefix for a quantity being expressed?
storms that are 3000 kilometers across
This should clearly be expressed as 3 megameters with decimal places added where additional precision is warranted.
Re: (Score:2)
So you can imagine it, right?
Re: (Score:2)
The unit I would like to see the end of is Tonne.
1000 Kilograms is a Megagram.
Re: (Score:2)
But Mg is too easily confused with mg, so if someone messes up you may be getting your prescriptions delivered via dumptruck.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, to be fair, 3 megameters doesn't sound nearly as impressive as 3000 km. And impressiveness is definitely one of the goals of this article, certainly more than expressing an appropriate level of precision.
It is also in keeping with common usage on earth, people do tend to speak of thousands of km when traveling.
PSA: "Earth" = planet, "earth" = dirt (Score:2)