How the vortex on Jupiter is formed

The vortex on Jupiter is due to the fact that Jupiter rotates too fast to get on the car, interview, a cyclone formed by a temperamental planet.

How these cyclone clusters remain stable remains a mystery to scientists, and on Earth, cyclones drift towards the poles but gradually dissipate over land and cold water. Jupiter, by contrast, has neither land nor ocean, which raises the question: why didn't the cyclone simply drift to the poles and merge?

For example, Saturn has one cyclone for each of its polar regions. ）

"All the previous theories have suggested that the main cyclone over the polar regions of the giant planet plays a dominant role in the polar regions, as we observed on Saturn, or is still in a state of chaos," Li said. What we observed on Jupiter meant that the previous theories were wrong, and we needed some new theories to back it up.

To explain the mystery of Jupiter's cyclone formation, Li and his colleagues developed a computer model based on the size and speed of cyclonic storms observed by the Juno probe, focusing on factors that can maintain the stability of these geometries without merging.

The researchers found that the stability of these models depends partly on the depth at which the cyclones enter Jupiter's atmosphere, but mainly on the anticyclonic rings around each cyclone – that is, the anticyclonic rings rotate in the opposite direction to each cyclonic vortex, and the less shielding of the anticyclonic rings will cause cyclones to merge; The more shielding of the anticyclone rings will promote the separation of the cyclones from each other.

There are still many unsolved mysteries about cyclone clusters, such as why Jupiter's vortex happens to occupy a moderate anticyclonic shielding zone, and we don't know what caused Jupiter's cyclones to be in such a favorable position.

Scientists are currently studying how these cyclones formed in the first place, one possibility is that they formed near Jupiter's poles, where they are now; The other is when cyclones form in other regions and then migrate to the polar regions. The second speculation is more likely.

The accepted idea of the formation of spiral galaxies can be traced back to a point put forward by the Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy in the second century AD nearly 2,000 years ago. While trying to explain why the five planets in the night sky seemed to follow irregular orbits, a notion flashed through Ptolemy's mind, which he called "the current wheel." Fundamentally, this round of theory makes such a assumption:

When an object orbits in a circle, it itself makes a small circular motion, making it appear to be wobbly. In the 20s of the 20th century, this idea became popular again and was used to explain the similar irregular motion between the stars of the Milky Way. Later, this idea was still used to explain the formation of spiral arms in galaxies.

However, there is no information to support this view. Charles Francis, an independent mathematician in Hastings, England, has been working on a cosmological problem that requires him to analyze the motion of stars. He collected more than 20,000 stars from existing sky observations.

These stars are located in the Milky Way, and their orbital velocities have been precisely measured. Among these data, he noted a startling fact: none of them supported the thesis.

So Francis worked with Eric Anderson, an independent astronomer in Ashland, Oregon, to design a simulation based on the distribution of star velocities in sky observations. Not long ago, two scientists reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, page A, that simulations were carried out and that soon, about 300 million years, spiral arms similar to the Milky Way were formed.

These stars fit perfectly into the law of gravity proposed by Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago. "It's very simple," Francis said.

But I didn't accept this idea before, because I thought that if the law of gravity had been true, people would have known it for a long time. In fact, the law of gravity works directly and is in perfect agreement with the data. According to Francis's description, the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies operate like a huge funnel with spiral grooves into which billions of marbles are being injected.

The groove represents the gravitational field of the galaxy's spiral arm, and each marble finds a corresponding groove at the top of the funnel, and then runs along the groove, down a never-ending ramp, and the power increases as it runs. Eventually, the marble jumped out of the groove and strung into an adjacent higher groove, then fell back to a higher position in the original groove. Rainer Clement, an astronomer at the Max Planck Society Astronomy Branch in Heisenberg, Germany, said

The call** proposes an excellent way to explain the velocity distribution in the vicinity of the star we are observing. He said that the new round of space operations planned in the next few years should be able to map the positions and movements of more stars "with unprecedented precision."