Saturday, November 19, 2011

Touch-n-go accessorizing: Jupiter's brown belt - signs of life?

Could the activities of Jupiter's "now you see it, now you don't - and now you do again!" brown belt be due to some form of seasonal biological activity? It seems a tad peculiar that Jupiter's the only gas giant in our system with this phenomenon. Could life of some sort be what makes the difference? I could easily picture the changing cloud activity as akin to tuna swimming upstream every season to spawn, though probably with Jupiter it would be microbial rather than anything easily visible to the nekkid eye.





Just querious. :-)|||Jupiter's yellow clouds are the highest. They consist of ammonia. The next layer down are the brown clouds, which are ammonium hydrosulfide. The white clouds below those are actually water, like those on Earth. Below the white clouds are oceans of hydrogen in various forms and phases. The predominance of some of these colors vs. others is an indication of weather changes in the atmosphere, but has little potential to indicate the presence or absence of life, despite the organic chemicals that are present.|||It's extremely doubtful that anything could live in Jupiter's extreme environment. The changes in the colours of its belts are easily explained by meteorological and chemical activity. Jupiter shows more of this than the other gas giants because it's closer to the Sun and significantly warmer than the other giants: warmer temperatures lead to more chemical reactions.

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