Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Find Some Slood, and Fast!

It may be a tiny black spot at the top of this photo of Jupiter, but remember with Jupiter, size is relative. That little black spot is nearly the size of the Earth, and represents a gigantic hole punched in the planet's atmosphere by an unidentified bit of space debris. More detail here.

So, anybody know where we can find some slood?

Why slood, you may ask? Well, it's just a funny joke from one of writer Terry Pratchett's novels. Back when Comet Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter 15 years ago, Pratchett commented on the event in the prologue to one of his books (can't remember which at the moment). The comment was that inhabitants of a planet watched as trillions of tons of ice hit another planet that, in cosmic terms, was right next door, and did nothing about it, and then intimated that more ice was on the way to their planet, whose Supreme Being would part the clouds and exclaim, "Oh! Are you lot still here! I thought you'd discovered slood millions of years ago! I've got ten trillion tons of ice arriving on Tuesday!"

No comments: