The Great Red Spot Is Disappearing

Ask anyone to tell you the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Jupiter, and I bet they'll say the Great Red Spot. It's impossible to imagine Jupiter without it, ask a child to draw Jupiter and it'll be the first thing they come up with. For as long as we've been pointing telescopes at it, the Great Red Spot has been there.

No storm lasts forever, even on Jupiter, and the Great Red Spot has been shrinking for decades. When Voyager 2 passed by in 1979, the storm was more than twice the size of Earth, a far cry from observations during the 19th century, when the Great Red Spot was at least four times the size of Earth, but still pretty big. But now the Great Red Spot is only slightly bigger than the Earth, and it may be gone entirely in 20 years.

Is it going to be a difficult time when the Great Red Spot finally disappears? Given how much trouble people have accepting Pluto isn't a planet anymore, I'd say yes. I'm going to say the memory of the Great Red Spot will outlive the storm's demise, though whether it will live longer than the storm is another question entirely. Can we keep up the Great Red Spot mythos for hundreds of years? That may be tricky.

Want to See a Picture of an Atom?

Well, here you go! One picture of an atom, coming up!

Obviously, there's some hijinks going on, but that picture is of a single atom suspended in an ion trap. And that's some cool stuff. The picture's won a science photography prize, which I think is well-deserved.

Review: The Landings Golf Club of Clearwater

And that is the only time I, anyone, or anyplace other than the official website will refer to it by its full name.

I'd like to tell you that we're in for an exciting time here, and that The Landings is a high-quality, fun, and challenging golf course. But it isn't, and we're not in for an exciting time. I'm not even sure I can be funny about how bad it is. It's not even a good enough course to get to bad. Well, we can try anyway, maybe inspiration will strike.

If you're smart, you may suspect that The Landings has that name for a reason, and you're right! It's located right next to the Clearwater Airport. If you're now thinking that Floridian golf didn't need any help being flat and that the land next to a Florida airport must be some of the flattest land in the world, well, you're right again! I'm really not doing a good job of convincing you that reading this will be worth your time, am I? Well, before I do any more damage, let's get to business. Oh, don't worry, I won't take up two weeks of your time with this. One week, and I'll only hit the most noteworthy holes (ie., the least boring ones).

The second hole is a medium length par 4, weighing in at just over 400 yards. But because this is an executive course with a par of 63, and an overall length of less than 4,500 yards, this is the longest hole on the course. And it's interesting for more than that reason too! This is one of the two holes that plays directly against the airport. You can slice a drive right onto a runway! Sadly, I didn't do that, so I was deprived of the opportunity to say that I hit a golf ball onto an airport. The greenside bunker vaguely favors a shot from the right, so you're better off hitting close to the OB line, and I can't believe I just implied that there was some sort of strategy at this course.

The second hole. The airport is on the right.

The third hole is a shortish par 3, and isn't really that interesting, but you can see the runway in the picture, so here you go. It's not in play, really, but it's providing scenic interest!

It's like Pebble Beach here.

The fourth hole is a fairly short par 4, and it also plays along the runway. So if you didn't slice one over there on the second, you've got another opportunity here. The second shot is fairly tough, I suppose, a pitch to a well-bunkered green.

The fourth hole. More runway right.

Literally the most difficult shot in the universe.

The ninth hole is a short par 4, with a pond sort of in play on the left. If you lay up with a long iron, it's not a problem, but if you use a driver, it is something extra to think about. Since I started on 10, this was my last hole of the day.

The ninth hole

The eleventh hole is the longest hole on the back nine, and considering this was the first actual drive I hit during the round (the tenth hole is a 130 yard par 3), it's not the easiest tee shot in the world. The OB left is a concern. The green is very wide open though, so as long as you get your drive in play, you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

The eleventh hole, with OB left.

Hit a good drive, and it's a definite birdie opportunity. Not much trouble around the eleventh green.

The thirteenth hole is, and I use this phrase lightly, probably the best hole on the course. It's another short par 4, just over 310 yards, so probably just out of reach with the driver unless you're really long. The road to the left isn't really in play, but that group of trees just to the right of the fairway definitely is. If you want the best angle into the green, you'll have to at the very least get near them, if not challenge them directly. You don't want to leave yourself an awkward half-shot over the greenside bunker. Again, this isn't anything earth-shattering, just a hole with a basic amount of interest. That makes for a good hole here.

The thirteenth hole

You don't want to approach this green from too far left.

The fifteenth hole is a par 3 that's only 94 yards. I know it's an executive course, but still, you don't often come across holes this short. Plus, you can see the landing strip behind the green, and I don't know, I was alright with this hole. The green wasn't dead flat, and sometimes it's nice to hit little wedges off of the tee. It's okay in my book.

The fifteenth hole. A tiny little par 3.

The sixteenth hole is a long par 3 at 217 yards. I kind of like the way the fairway on this par 3 moves, so that's why I'm including it. After a round of basically runways, even a little bit of elevation change is noticeable.

The sixteenth hole.

Hey, I said it wasn't much, but it felt like it. It's Florida, what do you expect?

The eighteenth hole is a very, very short par 4, playing just over 250 yards. If you can hit your driver any sort of reasonable distance, you're almost certainly thinking eagle on this hole. And that's fair enough, but just consider the two bunkers flanking the green, they do provide a bit of challenge. This is definitely a birdie hole, but at least it's not completely brainless.

Well now, how much fun was that? No, I won't try to pump this course up as anything other than an extremely basic executive course that probably isn't worth the money. This was $18, Clearwater Country Club was $25, I believe, and you get an actual golf course for that extra $7. Not a great one, but far more interesting than this. Wentworth was $35, and even though I wasn't a fan of the back nine, that course is easily twice the course this was. So my advice, pay a little more, go somewhere better, unless you're operating on no sleep and just want somewhere to play. This course isn't worth your time otherwise.

A Pair of Exoplanet News Stories

February 5th was a good day for exoplanet enthusiasts. Two stories, both interesting in their own ways. Funny how it happens like this sometimes.

Let's start off with the less immediately useful news. For the very first time, we have detected planets...in another galaxy. Yes, you heard me, another galaxy. And we're not talking about one of Magellanic Clouds, or even Andromeda, we're talking about planets in the quasar galaxy RX J1131-1231, which is, um, 3.8 billion light-years away. Yeah, we're not getting there any time soon.

ESO/M. Kornmesser

How have we managed to ferret these planets out, when we have trouble finding planets orbiting stars right next door, and we're not even entirely convinced we've discovered every planet in our own solar system? We can thank gravitational microlensing for that. I won't explain how that works, but it involves general relativity, and a gravitational midpoint focusing far-off light in just the right way so we see it as if it were nearby. Okay, I explained it a little bit. We've discovered a few dozen planets in the Milky Way using this method, but we're not talking about a few dozen planets this time, we're talking a couple thousand, from objects as small as the moon to ones the size of Jupiter. Obviously, we have no chance of ever seeing these places directly, but it is very cool that we can even find them in the first place, and even learn a bit about them.

The second bit of exoplanet news is, well, not exactly practical, but certainly much more so that intergalactic exoplanets. TRAPPIST-1 is, after all, 100 million times closer to Earth that RX J1131-1231. If that name rings a bell, it should, I've written about it before. A seven planet system around a red dwarf, three of which are in the habitable zone? And at only 40 light-years away, TRAPPIST-1 is close, much closer than any of the other potentially habitable exoplanets we've found, which are almost all Kepler discoveries and are hundred or even thousands of light-years out. That makes it a very inviting place to study, and study it we have. TRAPPIST-1 (named for the Belgian beermakers, if you're curious), is likely now the most studied solar system outside our own, and the results we've gotten so far are very promising. We've found water, and lots of it. We've found these planets don't have thick hydrogen/helium atmospheres and are almost certainly terrestrial.

While nearly all the planets in the system are interesting, TRAPPIST-1e is particularly noteworthy. It's a bit smaller and a bit less massive than Earth, but it has a very similar density to Earth, meaning it most likely has an iron core, like Earth. And that means a magnetic field. It likely doesn't have a tremendously thick atmosphere or an enormous world-covering ocean. It receives nearly the same amount of light Earth does. Granted, 1e is tidally locked, but in every other way, it's exactly the sort of planet we've been looking for. I expect to hear a lot more about TRAPPIST-1e in the future.

Planning for Humanity's Afterlife May Not Be So Simple

This VERY LONG (fair warning) article raises an interesting point. The human race won't be around forever, and obviously, we don't want our entire legacy to be lost forever. So we leave artifacts of our existence that would last for billions of years, job done, right?

Well, perhaps not. Signs of our intelligence may not be so obvious to outsiders with absolutely no context as to our civilization. Math, geometric shapes, or even simpler types of art may not be immediately recognized as being artificial. These things can happen naturally, as the article mentions. And even if artifacts are recognized as being artifacts of some lost civilization, there's still the matter of context. There are languages out there that are completely incomprehensible to us, like Etruscan. We had a similar issue with hieroglyphics, of course, famously solved with the Rosetta stone, but then the issue becomes finding a truly universal language, something that will absolutely 100% be recognized as language.

Like I said, it's a very long article and I haven't read all of it. But it's an interesting subject, and definitely worth considering.