Vacation Guide to the Solar System by Olivia Koski

Author:Olivia Koski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-08T11:17:52+00:00

Weather and Climate

Pack your best storm gear, and prepare to feel the wind on your face(plate). Weather on Jupiter is never dull. Everything on this gas giant is more extreme than on Earth. Wind speeds are 120 miles per hour higher than record gusts back home. Storms here can last for decades, and the most famous, the hurricane known as the Great Red Spot, has been raging for hundreds of years. The skies are full of lightning a thousand times more powerful than on Earth, and thunder races across the sky four times faster. If you’re used to measuring the distance from a lightning strike by counting seconds from flash to boom, relax. The storm will be four times farther away than you think on Jupiter. The thunder is unrecognizable—not a low rumble, but an eerie screech, shifted in pitch by the abundant hydrogen and helium in the atmosphere.

Jupiter is the fastest-rotating planet. At the top of the clouds near the equator, the length of the day is only ten hours. Don’t feel bad if you sleep away an entire Jovian day. It’s perfectly normal. Because the planet has no solid ground, the length of day varies between the equator and the poles. The gases move slower at the poles, and you’ll gain a few minutes per day when you’re near them. The concept of a day is flexible in this amorphous, spinning sphere of turbulence. But that’s half the fun.

It’s cold out here, 500 million miles from the sun, where it is only 4 percent as bright. Though Jupiter is virtually made of storms, conditions remain steady throughout the twelve-Earth-year-long journey around the sun, because Jupiter has a very small tilt of only a few degrees. The temperatures vary as you navigate up or down through Jupiter’s bright clouds. The usual forecast calls for high winds and temperatures in the -160s at one bar level, the region where the atmospheric pressure is similar to Earth’s at sea level. Not warm by any stretch, but there are even colder places farther out.

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