Jupiter's Pants are Falling Down!

Okay, not really. But on May 9 of this year, Jupiter came out from the other side of the sun with its Southern Equatorial Belt mysteriously absent. 

Image from acquerra.com.au (I couldn't get permission, no contact info on website)

This has happened before. Jupiter's southern belt seems to disappear on a roughly 15-year cycle, with the last disappearance being in the early 1990s. Astronomers weren't really quite sure what was going on. Amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley from Australia was the first to catch a glimpse of the belt's disappearance as it rounded the sun. 

"It is not known why the belt periodically disappears, but it may be that it sinks lower if it cools, and then the view of it is obscured by clouds pouring in over the top of it. The clouds on Jupiter are tens of thousands of kilometers deep. Wesley said the phenomenon could be linked to storm activity that preceded the change." (Jupiter has lost one of its cloud stripes - Physorg.com)

Wow. Apparently, astronomers were suspecting that Jupiter would be going through another fading cycle as it passed behind the sun. The exact date probably never will be discovered.

Bubble Trouble

Hey, this is cool:

Some researchers at Harvard have taken a closer look at how bubbles pop. Why? Don’t they just *pop* and then they’re gone?

Video coming- coder girlfriend is fixing it

Well, it turns out that’s not the case. Apparently, when you pop a bubble from the top, the film surrounding it doesn’t just disappear. A small hole appears and starts to fall towards the surface of the water as the air rushes out. The air tries to make the hole bigger, but the molecules at the edges of the hole have enough momentum to stay close together until they hit the surface. What’s left is a toroidal or doughnut-shaped bubble that quickly fractures into multiple daughter bubbles. These usually don’t last long, and pop soon after. If they’re big enough, sometimes these can repeat the process. It hasn’t been observed for more than two steps, once you pop the bubble twice the remaining daughters are too small.

Top 5 things I like about space

So I wanted to start What I Like About Space with a bang, so here is a list of my top five favourite things about space!

5. Space is Big.

Space is mind-bogglingly big. Space is so big you could travel your entire life in a spaceship going as fast as we know how to make it go and not even reach the closest star. And there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Wow.

Space is so enormously huge that astronomers had to come up with a new measurement of distance to describe just how far away things are. They took the fastest stuff in the universe, light, (which travels at roughly 300,000,000m in a second!) and calculated how far it traveled in a year. That’s 9,460,528,405,000km (5,878,499,814,210.01miles). Our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light-years away. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how far that is. Our galaxy is an even more mind-numbing one hundred thousand light-years from side to side. The biggest galaxy close to us, Andromeda, is over two million light years from the Milky Way. And the edge of the visible universe is approximately 13.5 billion light-years away.

*pant* *pant*

Wow. The universe is huge. We’re absolutely miniscule. And I love it.