Planetary Science: Juno Teaches Us It Is Often "What Lies Beneath" That Defines... True Beauty...

Earlier this past week, NASA/JPL's sublime Juno mission, now in a stable elliptical orbit at Jupiter, released new findings -- on the surprising middle of the Jovian giant -- which, it turns out, behaves more like a solid planet, than a pure gaseous one. [At the pressures generated there, by its almost unimaginably-immense gravitational (and magnetic) fields, the gas we know as hydrogen (at our Earth temperatures and pressures) becomes a vast ocean of viscous metal, and rotates something like our iron core. But only something like it.]

Meanwhile, as the below JPL NASA video shows, the upper surface (still gaseous) layers’ structure -- like peeling an onion, layer by layer -- is wholly unlike anything we would ever experience on Earth. You see, those upper layers on Jupiter contain more mass that a million Earth atmospheres. Just. . . amazing.

Do go read it all -- but the longer I live, the more I come to believe that much of the mystery of science is better accessed through. . . poetry, than tables, equations and figures, thus:

Sunday Afternoon

the idea of you

sits like God in my mind

with a pen and notebook

on the curbside of nowhere

where angels don't sing.

you don't know that your eyes

gleam with pictures of heaven

and if i believed in such a place,

it would surely be ruled by you.

draw shapes of jupiter in my palm

and i'll write a poem about how it felt

when the girl who held the world with her fingertips

sang me to sleep

on a Sunday afternoon. . . .

And still, I am haunted by waters. . . . here is that promised NASA video:



G'night -- नमस्ते