Check Your Slood Supplies Now

Egad. Jupiter has lost one of its most prominent features -- a salmon-hued stripe twice the width of Earth that usually girds its southern hemisphere in the latitudes of the Great Red Spot.

Top: Jupiter, without stripe. Bottom: Jupiter, with southern stripe.

For a kid like me who spent hours creating drawing after drawing of Jupiter featuring the Great Red Spot with that stripe wrapping around it, this is big news.

New Scientist has an explanation, while the rest of the world's media -- especially in England, for some reason -- goes completely ape over this story: The stripe isn't gone, it's just concealed by high-altitude white clouds that occasionally cover the stripe. It did so when Pioneer 10 visited the planet in the late 1970s, and did so again in the 1990s, according to NS. England's The Daily Mail has some interesting info on Jupiter's odd weather patterns that may have caused the stripe's disappearance.

Why does this all remind me of a Bill Murray line from Ghostbusters:

"I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you, sir. I'm glad you're feeling better. You're still rather pale, though."

Jupiter, hope you get feeling better.

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!"