Never one to shirk from gutter humor in times of stress and anxiety, I was amused to read a recent article from Popular Science that “…our image of Uranus hasn’t advanced substantially beyond the featureless blue beachball captured by Voyager 2’s vintage instruments in 1986.”
Uranus is an odd planet. Where others spin, Uranus rolls, tipped on its side with its poles pointing generally toward or away from the sun. Its magnetic field is bonkers too, offset from the planet’s center and tipped at a wild 60 degrees to the side. Planetary astronomers are blind to that magnetic field from Earth, although the Hubble Space Telescope can occasionally catch an indirect glimpse via Uranus’s auroras—which can shine far from the poles.
Last year, while combing through NASA’s archives of the Voyager 2 mission, two planetary scientists noticed something earlier analyses had overlooked—a blip in Uranus’s magnetic field as the spacecraft cruised through a magnetic bubble of sorts. They spotted a special 60-second long section of Voyager 2’s 45-hour flyby where the magnetic field rose and fell in an instantly recognizable way.
They deduced that it might be a plasmoid. Plasmoids are charged globs of atmosphere blown out into space when the solar wind whips around planets. Losing such blobs can dramatically transform a world over a long period of time, and studying them can provide insight into how planets live and die.
The Voyager team initially assumed the magnetic wackiness was linked to the Uranus’s belly flop position, but when the spacecraft flew by Neptune (which stands up straight) three years later it saw the same apparent mismatch between the planet and its field. Now researchers assume that something about the worlds’ inner workings must set their magnetic fields apart.
The article was titled:
“Uranus blasted a gas bubble 22,000 times bigger than the Earth.”
In other words:
Uranus farted!
National Parks trip – Grand Tetons
I know, I know. I have been absent and have failed to fulfill my complement of bitching and grousing.
I will return to that subject but first – another trip, this time to three US National Parks; the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and Glacier. My wife and I took this trip in May, starting at the Grand Tetons then moving north first through Yellowstone and then Glacier. Taking the trip early in the season meant some chanciness in the weather. The Grand Tetons had some rainy weather but we got an improvement in Yellowstone and Glacier. We also got a look at a number of critters including black bears and a grizzly. More on that later.
First up, the Grand Tetons.
The first four pictures are the classic one (though a bit cloudy) of the Snake River in the foreground and the Tetons in the background. The Tetons are unusual in that, unlike most mountain ranges (the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Cascades and Sierra Nevada’s), they rise directly from a flat valley without any foothills. It’s all due to tectonic activity and the fact that one tectonic plate is moving directly under another and, as one plate rises, erosion levels the valley floor. At times, it is as though there is a flat valley floor and the Tetons are huge fake drapery to convince you that there are mountains.
During our visit, we took the boat ride across Jenny Lake and the next picture shows the approach to the landing dock. A hike with a 600 foot in elevation change took us to hidden falls (next picture).
A Mormon community attempted to establish a farming community in the latter part of the nineteenth century and this barn is often captured in photographs of the now abandoned buildings of that community.
Next is a picture taken from our bedroom balcony at the Jackson Lake Lodge and the last is one on our departure to Yellowstone as the weather cleared.
[Next up is Yellowstone.]
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Tagged commentary, Grand Tetons, Jackson Lake Lodge, National Parks, news, no bitching or grousing, tectonic activity, travel