Tuesday 11 June 2013

The strangest weather from other worlds

3: Pluto.
Because it is so far from the Sun a Pluto year is 248 Earth years long. Which is both excessive and inconvenient - it could have been a nice round 250 years but no, nature had to be a bugger. 

A series of shots from the Hubble space telescope showing different sides to Pluto as it spins.  Yes I know it's crap quality, Pluto is so far out it takes probes ten years to get there, and even Hubble has limits....

One of the things this affects is Pluto's winters: Winter on Pluto is so cold, and so long, that the air itself turns into snow and falls to the ground. But, to balance things out, the gravity is so weak that in the summer a large amount of the air escapes into space. So, on Pluto the air itself often has no ide what's going on.

2: Titan.
On Titan, Saturn's largest moon, it rains liquid Methane - yep the same stuff that comes out of your gas cooker as, um, a gas.

Above: An Infra red image of Titan.

Titan has a balmy surface temperature of -180 degrees Celsius, so water is frozen as hard as rock, and things that are gas here on Earth can condense as liquids. You've heard of arctic explorers having their pee freeze solid as it comes out? On Titan your farts would freeze into slush and splatter all over your legs.

Above: A radar image of a liquid methane/ethane sea on Titan.

There are methane (and Ethane) rivers and lakes, perhaps even  methane drinking life....

1: Jupiter:

Image above: Jupiter, the Great Red Spot, and the volcanic moon Io.

The great Red spot is an Earth sized storm that is at least three hundred years old. The weird thing is that old Red seems to be sustaining it self by eating the smaller storms, preying on them and stealing their power.....

Honourable mention: The Moon.
In some valleys and craters on the moon it has been night-time for over a billion years.....


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