The Godfather
Reading time: 6 min
4.5 billion years ago, 27000 light-years away from the
center of the milky way, A STAR IS BORN.
The rotating cloud of gas and dust could not bear its
gravity anymore. It had no choice but to collapse. Giving birth to a star,
the SUN.
There is rejoice but not peace. There is pleasure but not contentment. The violent remnants of the sun are in rage.
The dust cloud isn’t satisfied yet! There is something else also coming into form on the far outer edge….. from the material left by the sun.
.
.
Wow! It's sweeping through this dust so fast. Seems pretty hungry………. Wait! It has all the ingredients…Will it be the second star? Amazing! This system would look so beautiful……………STOPPPP WHAT’S HAPPENING?? WHY IS THIS SECOND STAR MOVING TOWARDS SUN!!??? THEY’LL COLLIDE. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! STOPPPPPPP……..
*dramatic music*
Oh No! It has now started disrupting the asteroid belt on
its way!! Ahhhhhhh……its intense gravity is making these asteroids smash into
each other….it is taking them towards the sun …..
*dramatic music
intensifies*
THE ASTEROIDS ARE COLLIDING!! This place is getting so
violent……STOP JUPITER!! CALM DOWN!
.
.
.
.
.
.
*relaxing music*
Oh, I’m coming into.... existence……...My twin sister is coming into form! Hello Venus.
Oh there’s Mercury and Mars……..So, this “pseudo-star” Jupiter helped us form!?! Had he not disrupted the asteroids …we would have never existed……..
Thank you ‘Godfather’.
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Hey cosmoplorers! What’s happening? It's your Cosmorer again. Yeah more commonly known as Earth, but my friend pleaseeeee you don't call me that. You know I hate it.
It’s been a long time no see, ha? Even though you didn’t ask
where I have been, let me tell you folks š. I had been falling short of breath, going
through everything. Completing an orbit around Sun. The winter solstice, the
spring equinox, the summer solstice. And so many times the sun and my moon came
face-to-face and ended up fighting about who is more pretty. And I had to come
in the middle of them to hold them back (Oh well, when this happens and it
happens a lot, I’ve heard Earthians calling it a “lunar eclipse”. Trust me
those people are strange! They even give names to the fights).
And on top of all this….. I have been constantly defending the asteroids, and there are a lot of them! Well actually, I don’t have to worry much about it. I have a shield š
*drum roll please*
GODFATHER JUPITER!!
Jupiter: “100011101010100100100001010111101”
“Oh! Wait. Let me just….oh OK....think we are good to go now. I have installed a binary to English converter.”
Jupiter: “Well, Thank you earth! Should have done it before. Good for nothing.”
“Hey! I’m sorry! And I would be pleased if you discard my human variant name! ‘COSMORER’ PLEASE! ”
Jupiter: “Ha! Whatever! Sooooo, I was saying, Wassup milkywayians and andromedians!”
“Ah… sorry but no andromedian would be reading this.”
Jupiter: “Oh. Why? Weren’t we sharing our content intergalactically?"
“Yeah, but the presidents of both galaxies are at a cold conversation…..both have jammed each other's content on the internet…”
Jupiter: “Ohhh. Let's just hope it goes well…..OK! So shall we begin? Hey, it has been some years since your birth. Ahhh, 4.5 billion something I guess. Right?”
“Yes, 4.543 billion years”
Jupiter: “Ya, I still remember the day of your birth….well not day, your years and years of birth! Ha, some 20 million years! ”
“How soon time flies!..........OK, enough of talks. Let's get into serious discussions now. Oh wait, before beginning I have something to tell our cosmoplorers. Even though you are reading the conversation between me and Jupiter without any time lag, it actually takes 42 ‘earth-minutes’ on average for every message exchanged between us! Quite slow for today's technology, right? NO! it is the fastest and the best anyone in this universe can achieve! You know we communicate gravitationally through the space-time fabric we share, with a speed of 3 x 108 m/s."
Jupiter: “Hey! This number looks familiar. Isn’t this
the speed of light? ”
“Oh yes! It is! The speed of light and gravitational waves
match up. Looks like someone is learning physics lately.” *chuckles*
Jupiter: “See, I have no choice. That Saturn already
had those beautiful rings to tease me and now they have more moons than me!! 82
MOONS CONFIRMED and many more still awaiting discovery! *sobbing sounds* You see I really need something to look
smarter than Saturn, something to stop Saturn boasting around on our annual
get-together parties….So some months back I sent some gravitational waves to
other gas-giants, Neptune and Uranus, for some suggestions and as obvious, that
crazy Uranus came up with the craziest of their ideas. Like Uranus's own insane
rolling in their orbit at 98 degree axes tilt wasn’t enough, they want me to
change my tilt from 3 to 23 degrees and start having seasons like you”
“What?? I’m laughing so badly….You tilting your axes??”
Jupiter: “Thank goodness, Neptune forwarded my gravitational wave to Pluto and Pluto came with a very geeky but brilliant idea. Says I should learn about our universe, the laws and mathematics that govern it, to geek off at parties. So now I’m having my lessons from Pluto!”
“Wow! That is actually a genius suggestion. But hey, you
have those beautiful bands of gases and how can someone forget that magnificent
‘Great Red Spot’ you have! Oh....Oh.... So why not start with this beautiful spot? Tell
us something about it. And how big is it?? And yes, what actually is it?”
Jupiter: “ Well its size keeps on changing. Some 17 years back (year 2004 for Earthians), it was thrice as big as you. Now it’s something about 1.3 times bigger
than your diameter.”
“Wow! That means 16,350 kilometers wide…Breathtaking!! To bring it more into perspective, cosmoplorers, do you know that to escape my gravitational force, i.e. to go into space from my surface, you just need to travel 100 kilometers. So this magnificent great red spot is about 160 times greater than that distance!! Well space isn't that far for 'Earthians' "
Jupiter: “Hey, maybe you can add some visual for comparison.”
“Oh yes! Lemme just search it on the web. These humans would
definitely have something…….Oh and here we go! Found one! I’ll add it up on the
blog.”
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Christopher Go
“ Wow! I am still
trying to grasp the sheer vastness of this spot. It is so
huuuuugggeeeeee. I think it is a good time to bring your size into perspective
too.”
Jupiter: “Well I could fit about 1300 Earths in me
and I'm about 71,492 km wide at the equator, which is about eleven Earths lined
up I guess. ”
“Eleven ‘Cosmorers’ if you please!”
Jupiter: “Ya. OK. It’s equal to eleven "Cosmorers" lined up. Now OK?”
“Perfect!”
Jupiter: “And if you talk about my mass…..If you
somehow combined all the planets of our solar system….. I would still have
twice the mass than this new ‘super-planet’”
“Amazing. Just in case if you are a non-solarian (not a resident of solar system) and don’t know who falls under the ‘Planets-Category’ in our system…Here you go. We have a total of 8 planets… Mercury, Venus, Me, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, all named after Roman and Greek Gods and Goddesses.”
Jupiter: “You know I am a bit disheartened about
Pluto not being categorized as a planet anymore. Why did they have to do this?
I mean that lil geeky champ is far better than all of us. Pluto deserved that
title!”
“Well Jupiter, you see when the standards set up for
categorizing planets got redefined, Pluto had to be declassified.”
Jupiter: “But PLUTO IS BIG ENOUGH to be called a
planet.”
“Yes…OK…so lemme tell you… For a celestial body to be called a planet, they not only need to orbit the sun and achieve "hydrostatic equilibrium", that is to say, to remain spherical, but also need to have cleared their orbit….which is to say, the planet should be gravitationally dominant with no other celestial bodies in their neighborhood other than their own satellites....and we all know Pluto has a LOT of trans-Neptunian objects in its neighborhood. So….."
Jupiter:
“That hurts! I could only imagine how bad Pluto would have felt ….you
know…given Pluto's the only one with a heart!!”
“Yes.
But we still love Pluto.”
Oh
sorry! Not this ……
This!
Pluto
Pluto's heart
Source:
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
“Okay,
so let's continue.”
Jupiter:
“So where were we? Oh yes, the red spot! So as I was saying it's
really-really huge!
“True.
Hey, but what exactly is that spot ?? What it is made of?”
Jupiter:
“Oh it’s a storm.”
“Whaaaaattttt???
IT’S A STORM!!??! A storm that huge?”
Jupiter:
“ And you know what! It has persisted for much more than 350 years.”
“Now
that’s completely insane. How can a storm last for so long? The storms I get have
a lifetime of just a few days”
Jupiter:
“Dear, that’s because you have solid land to slow them down. So when a cyclone
on you, after raging for sometime in the water, hits the land, it starts experiencing
friction. The resistance from land is what slows it down. But I have no surface
at all! I’m a gaseous giant! So what else do you expect when the storm is just traveling
through the gases that made up the storm?”
“Ohhhh.
That makes sense now.”
Jupiter:
“So I guess now you’ve got the idea why Great red spot is ‘great’. Do you wanna
know why it’s called ‘red’ spot?”
“Of
course!”
Jupiter:
“Becauseeeeeee…… it is…..red in color! Duh!”
“Ha
ha ha. So lame. Telllllll meeee pleaseeee, how come it’s red?”
Jupiter:
“Ok Ok… It’s due to the ammonium-rich clouds being irradiated with solar
radiation. My top layer of the atmosphere is made up of Ammonia and below that,
I have a layer of ammonium hydrosulphide clouds. And if you go to the lowest
layer of clouds, it’s just water vapor. But when these three gases combine,
they give white clouds and not red. Here is when solar radiation comes into
action. When sunlight falls, it splits the methane molecules in the upper atmosphere
to form acetylene. This acetylene then drifts down to the ammonia clouds, where
ultraviolet radiations from the sun trigger further reactions and produce the
reddish compound. And you know there’s one more interesting thing about it. The
cloud-tops of this spot are about 8 km higher than the surrounding cloud-tops. Do
you know what this would mean? As it is much higher than the surrounding ones, the
ammonium clouds can react with more acetylene that is produced in the upper
atmosphere, which meeaaannss, more red than others!!”
“Wow! This is so cool !!”
A
high contrast image of the Great red spot, called ‘The Rose’, taken by NASA JunoCam and processed by
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Jupiter: “ Ohhh I gotta go now. An asteroid coming this way. Have to take it in.”
“Oh okay, but there’s a lot of things I still have to ask you.”
Jupiter: “Yes we are gonna continue this.”
“Yeah okay then! See you soon”
To be continued :)
Well doneš„³
ReplyDeleteSo much information in such little space š„
You are getting better at telling stories Cosmorerš
Waiting for the next blog.
Thank you <3
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