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Автор Бен Бова
Leviathans of Jupiter
by Ben Bova
But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
THE BOUNDLESS SEA
It is an endless ocean, more than ten times wider than the entire planet Earth. Beneath the swirling clouds that cover Jupiter from pole to pole, that ocean has never seen sunlight, nor has it ever felt the rough confining contours of land. Its waves have never crashed against a craggy shore, never thundered upon a sloping beach, for there is no land anywhere across Jupiter’s enormous girth: not even an island or a reef. The ocean’s billows sweep across the face of the deeps without hindrance, eternally.
Heated from below by the planet’s seething core, swirled into frenzy by Jupiter’s hyperkinetic spin rate, ferocious currents race through this endless sea, liquid jet streams howling madly, long powerful wave trains surging uninterrupted all the way around the world, circling the globe over and over again. Gigantic storms rack the ocean, too, typhoons bigger than whole planets, hurricanes that have roared their fury for century after century.
Jupiter is the largest of all the solar system’s planets, more than ten times bigger and three hundred times as massive as Earth. Jupiter is so immense it could swallow all the other planets easily. Its Great Red Spot, a storm that has raged for centuries, is itself wider than Earth. And the Spot is merely one feature visible among the innumerable vortexes and streams of Jupiter’s frenetically racing cloud tops.
Yet Jupiter is composed mainly of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, more like a star than a planet.
All that size and mass, yet Jupiter spins on its axis in less than ten hours, so fast that the planet is clearly not spherical. Its poles are noticeably flattened. Jupiter looks like a big, colorfully striped beach ball that’s squashed down as if some gigantic invisible child were sitting upon it.Spinning that fast, Jupiter’s deep, cloud-topped atmosphere is swirled into bands and ribbons of multihued clouds: pale yellow, saffron orange, white, tawny yellow-brown, dark brown, bluish, pink and red. Titanic winds push the clouds across the face of Jupiter at hundreds of kilometers per hour. What lies beneath them? For a century planetary astronomers had cautiously sent probes into the Jovian atmosphere. They barely penetrated the cloud tops before being crushed by overwhelming pressure.
But the inquisitive scientists from Earth persisted and gradually learned that some fifty thousand kilometers beneath those clouds—nearly four times Earth’s diameter—lies that boundless ocean, an ocean almost eleven times wider than Earth and some five thousand kilometers deep. Heavily laced with ammonia and sulfur compounds, highly acidic, it is still an ocean of water. Everywhere in the solar system, where there is liquid water, life exists.
