Dave’s posterous

Today I give special thanks for the planet Jupiter ... and you should too.  Though not to the point of worshiping it yet, we all owe it a huge debt.

"Huge" being the salient word here.  Most of us know that Jupiter is the largest planet in our neck of the woods.  It is the 5th from the sun; has many satellites and is one of the brightest objects in the night sky

Being the giant that it is, it carries with it a massive gravitational well¹.  Since I doubt that most folks, on this list, are too interested in a 1/r² force law where one needs a three-dimensional rubber sheet bending into a fourth spatial dimension for a good idea of gravitational wells which is unlike the normal textbook views of an isometric embedding of a constant-time equatorial slice of the Schwarzschild metric in Euclidean 3-space, so I'll rapidly move on.  (Thanks also given for "cut and paste". op cit¹)

So instead consider this simpler, but easy to understand, analogy.  Pretend you are a ferrous metal ball who happens into a room of magnetic personalities.  Who are you most likely to be attracted to?  The one with the most dazzling magnetic personality, of course.  See how much you know about astro-physics ;-)    ?

Loose canon chunks of space crud are no different.  They are also attracted to the big attractors too.  Locally, the Sun gets the lion's share of the free masses to gobble up but Jupiter gets some too and, fortunately for us, with the Sun, Jupiter, moon and our atmosphere working for us, we don't get too many superheated rocks bouncing down on our heads at 25,000 mph.  Also, having an orbit closer to the raging, testerone imbued, ravaging hoardes of adolescent space rocks, Jupiter operates as a sentinel on our periphery.

Some of you may remember when pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter's cloud bands in July of 1994.  Well just this past Sunday, while you were in church praying for the San Diego Padres not to finish in the cellar, Jupiter again did you a great kindness with neither your prayers nor thanks as incentives.  An old, bored asteroid, looking for a good time, ran into our ol' pal.  As you look at this picture (also embedded below but san citations) and read the scale consider what would happen if Jupiter was not there and the asteroid had decided to pay a surprise visit to Earth instead.  Yes ... that's correct, the visible debris field, in the Jovian picture is roughly 10,000 MILES in diameter from a SMALL comet or meteor.  For a frame of reference the New York to San Diego distance is 2,432 miles.

Thank you, Jupiter for working so hard, for so many, thanklessly ... until now.

Sincerely,
Dave

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