Jupiter’s Great Red Spot shrinking: NASA
Washington: The gigantic storm on Jupiter known as the ‘Great Red Spot’ continues to shrink mysteriously and become more circular, new images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found. Scientists have produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry. Already, the Jupiter images have showed a rare wave just north of the planet’s equator and a unique filamentary feature in the core of the Great Red Spot not seen previously.
“Every time we look at Jupiter, we get tantalising hints that something really exciting is going on,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. Simon and her colleagues produced two global maps of Jupiter from observations made using Hubble’s high-performance Wide Field Camera 3.
The new images confirm that the Great Red Spot continues to shrink and become more circular, as it has been doing for years. The long axis of this characteristic storm is about 240 kilometres shorter now than it was in 2014.
Recently, the storm had been shrinking at a faster-than-usual rate, but the latest change is consistent with the long-term trend.
The Great Red Spot remains more orange than red these days, and its core, which typically has more intense colour, is less distinct than it used to be.
An unusual wispy filament is seen, spanning almost the entire width of the vortex.
This filamentary streamer rotates and twists throughout the 10-hour span of the Great Red Spot image sequence, getting distorted by winds blowing at 150 meters per second or even greater speeds.
In Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt, the researchers found an elusive wave that had been spotted on the planet only once before, decades earlier, by Voyager 2.
In those images, the wave is barely visible, and nothing like it was seen again, until the current wave was found travelling at about 16 degrees north latitude, in a region dotted with cyclones and anticyclones. Similar waves – called baroclinic waves – sometimes appear in Earth’s atmosphere where cyclones are forming.
“Until now, we thought the wave seen by Voyager 2 might have been a fluke. As it turns out, it’s just rare!” said co-author Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal. (PTI)
Women office goers queue up to sample life of a monk in China
Beijing: More Chinese office goers, mainly women are joining programmes to experience life of a Buddhist monk to de-stress themselves from high pressure jobs.
Shanghai’s Yufo Temple has received a good response to its week-long program that lets people experience life as a monk. Most of the participants are female office workers, state-run Global Times reported.
The program will be held from October 15 to 21, and it is aimed at reducing stress by experiencing monks’ daily lives.
Activities include listening to the abbot’s teaching, copying Buddhist sutras, meditating and chanting. Master Huihong of the temple said that there were 108 places for the program and it was filled within 10 days.
During the programme, participants will go through a modified tonsure ceremony.
“We will not shave off all of the hair, but will only cut a bit of it, symbolising the ceremony,” he said adding that the program’s purpose is to let people experience the life of a monk, not to recruit people.
He also emphasised that meals will be provided in the temple, correcting some media reports that participants will have to beg for all of their food.
“(Begging for food) is a Buddhist ceremony and will be held at noon on the last day of the program. Participants will follow the master and walk a planned route,” Huihong said.
According to Yufo Temple, each participant has to pay 2,000 yuan (USD 315) for the program, to cover costs such as clothing, meals and renting venues. The temple is currently considering launching a second round of the program. (PTI)
Sun-warmed dinosaurs may have been good sprinters
Los Angeles: Some dinosaurs had the capacity to raise their body temperature using heat sources in the environment, such as the sun, and may have been surprisingly good sprinters, say scientists, including one of Indian-origin.
Scientists have long debated the nature of dinosaurs’ body temperatures and how those temperatures influenced their activity levels.
Researchers from the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) have found that some dinosaurs, at least, had the capacity to elevate their body temperature using heat sources in the environment, such as the sun. The animals were probably more active than modern-day alligators and crocodiles, which can be active and energetic, but only for brief spurts.
The researchers also found evidence that other dinosaurs they studied had lower body temperatures than modern birds, their only living relatives, and were probably less active.
Led by Robert Eagle, a researcher in the department of earth, planetary and space sciences in the UCLA College, the scientists examined fossilised dinosaur eggshells from Argentina and Mongolia.
Analysing the shells’ chemistry allowed them to determine the temperature at which the eggshells formed.
“This technique tells you about the internal body temperature of the female dinosaur when she was ovulating,” said Aradhna Tripati, a co-author of the study and a UCLA assistant professor of geology, geochemistry and geobiology.
The Argentine eggshells, which are approximately 80 million years old, are from large, long-necked titanosaur sauropods. The shells from Mongolia’s Gobi desert, 71 million to 75 million years old, are from oviraptorid theropods.
Sauropods’ body temperatures were warm – over 37 degrees Celsius, according to the study. The smaller dinosaurs had lower temperatures, probably below 32 degrees Celsius.
Warm-blooded animals, or endotherms, produce heat internally and typically maintain their body temperature, regardless of the temperature of their environment; they do so mainly through metabolism.
Cold-blooded animals, or ectotherms, including alligators, crocodiles and lizards, rely on external environmental heat sources to regulate their body temperature.
“The temperatures we measured suggest that at least some dinosaurs were not fully endotherms like modern birds,” Eagle said.
“They may have been intermediate – somewhere between modern alligators and crocodiles and modern birds; certainly that’s the implication for the oviraptorid theropods,” he said.
“This could mean that they produced some heat internally and elevated their body temperatures above that of the environment but didn’t maintain as high temperatures or as controlled temperatures as modern birds,” he added.
“If dinosaurs were at least endothermic to a degree, they had more capacity to run around searching for food than an alligator would,” he said. (PTI)
