The Planets

Wow, there are so many things going on in the area of astronomy that it blows your mind. Sometimes you have to wonder how things operate the way they do. Let's look at the great red spot on Jupiter for example. What is it? It is a storm, a storm that has been raging for about 350+ years. Can you imagine that? Just think of the damage that a storm like this would cause on Earth. It might even wipe out all life. The storm is so big that you can fit TWO Earths inside of it. Will this storm ever end, or will it just go on feeding off of some unknown source on the planet? You would think that by now the spot would begin to fade, but it seems to be very active. Since this storm started and we were able to observe it, it has only undergone minor changes in color and intensity. You would think that after all this time there would be very noticeable changes in the spot, but it just keeps rolling along and scientists have no idea if and when it will ever end.

Now a huge storm has formed on the planet Saturn, our other giant planet. Perhaps Saturn will be familiar to you when I mention the fact that it has rings around it. The storm is so big that it is about 2/3 rds the size of the planet Earth. It is located at the south pole of the planet and it is raging at 350 mph. This storm has scientists puzzled because it is the first time a hurricane has ever been seen on a planet other than Earth. The storm has the telltale eye in the center and eye-walls that are so characteristic of hurricanes here.

Did you know that every planet in our solar system has seasons? They do, however those seasons are a heck of a lot different than the ones we have here on Earth. When you compare the seasons on Earth against the seasons on the other planets you begin to realize something that wasn't that obvious at first glance. Our seasons don't vary much when you compare them to the variations in the seasons on the other planets. We think that there is a big difference between summer and winter, for example, because we are cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but the difference in temperature might only be 60 degrees or less at times. Compare this to a difference of hundreds of degrees on some planets and you will realize what I am talking about. The Earth rides in a circular orbit, so that no matter where it is, it is always about the same distance from the sun. This contributes greatly to keeping a pretty steady temperature, along with the tilt factor which causes the seasons.

Bizarre planet motions also contribute to strange weather. As far as astronomers can figure, all of the planets in the solar system have a orbit to rotation ratio of 1:1, except for Mercury. Mercury rotates 2.3 times on its trip around the sun, giving it a 2.3::1 orbit ratio. If we were to stand on Mercury and watch the sun rise, we might see the sun grow in size as it crosses the sky and before it sets you would see it stop and start going the other way. The temperature change on Mercury varies from -280 degrees F at night to +800 degrees F in the daytime. Talk about a large change in temperature, wow! When seasons change on Mercury it is basically temperature changes. Mercury has no atmosphere so we don't see storms on the planet, but some scientists are beginning to suspect that there are magnetic storms taking place.

Neptune

Neptune is a big place. The volume of Neptune is almost 60 times that of Earth. It is so far from the sun that it takes more than two human lifetimes to orbit the sun once or 165 years an orbit. As long as it take to orbit the sun you would think a day would be much longer on Neptune than Earth, but days have nothing to do with orbit time. A day on Neptune is a little over 16 Earth hours. There are storms taking place on Neptune that remind us of the storms that are on Jupiter, epically the great red spot. There is a storm on Neptune known as the Great Dark Spot. The storm is the size of the Earth. Clouds have been seen in the atmosphere by the Voyager probe and they resemble cirrus clouds on Earth. Why is it that a planet that is so different from Earth has clouds that resemble the ones on earth? Sorry this is one question that will have to remain unanswered for awhile.

I guess you can see by now that storms are common through the entire solar system. If our solar system is any indication of other solar systems, then we have to figure that storms of all different types are a common feature of planets with atmospheres and even those planets that don't have atmospheres might have other types of storms, such as the magnetic ones that I mentioned might be taking place on Mercury. Are storms a common denominator in the universe? I would have to say that it looks that way, but I guess we first have to define what we think a storm is. If we use the main definition of storm from Webster's dictionary than we have to conclude that the storms on Mercury are not storms since Webster's definition states that they are disturbances of the atmosphere and Mercury has no atmosphere. I think that this definition is now out of date where planets are concerned. Anyway storms seem to be everywhere and may be the most common event in the universe.