Jupiter is slightly smaller and flatter than scientists thought for decades, a new study finds.
Researchers used radio data from the Juno spacecraft to refine measurements of the solar system’s largest planet. Although the differences between the current and previous measurements are small, they are improving models of Jupiter’s interior and of other gas giants like it outside the solar system, the team reported Feb. 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Wouldn’t something of that size necessarily turn spherical due to its mass?
Or is there enough inertia from the planet spinning that it bulges at the equator?
I fucking knew it. Everyone knows that the Earth is round, but I just knew that Jupiter was flat!
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I think this is important. Many science history textbooks highlight that the ancients got the measures right by 5% off or that the modern era scientists got the quantity of oxidation (phlogistic) off by 5%. So it’s important to note that we are actually advancing in Science and that we are finding new horizons, not just repeating what the ancients or modern era scientists did.
Sure, but it’s not “textbooks need to be updated” important.
I think it could be, but the implication is at issue. It’s not like we need to update text books to say Jupiter isn’t the biggest planet anymore. It’s that we need to update the new versions to show how our improved measuring has allowed us to refine our knowledge.
Agreed, I even think this way of talking about science is harmful. We have all the basics figured out, we are working on the details. And a lot of the time you’d have to be an expert to even know what they are trying to figure out and how that differs from other explanations. The reason I think it’s harmful is because it leads people to believe we are still working on the basics and live changing discoveries are still possible. This opens them up to falling for scams, where some obvious bullshit is framed as a new discovery, or an old secret lost and found again, or something “they” don’t want you to know.
People say stuff like “scientists don’t know everything” or “scientists are wrong all the time” and it makes me cringe. People are convinced some people have psychic powers and if I dispute it they say something like: “We don’t know how brains work, so it might be possible”. Which is not just plain wrong, we know a lot about how brains work, it’s also irrelevant. Just because you don’t know how exactly your car is built or works, you know it can’t fly, because it has none of the things needed to fly. Large scale capabilities can be reasonably ascertained without knowing all of the details. We also have stuff like laws of thermodynamics, you can’t get around that, so we can say some things are impossible even though we don’t know everything.
