The scientific literature was wrong. The school textbooks will have to be replaced. Entire careers were built on falsehoods. New measurements overturn almost 50 years of consensus about the size and shape of the planet Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, which we now know is smaller than previously believed. Nature Astronomy:
We find a polar radius of 66,842 ± 0.4 km, an equatorial radius of 71,488 ± 0.4 km and a mean radius of 69,886 ± 0.4 km, which are 12 km, 4 km and 8 km smaller than previous estimates, respectively.
Hey, 12 kilometers is a lot. You walk home 12km in the rain in Arbroath in winter and tell me that it's no big deal.
The results indicate that winds above the visible cloud tops are largely barotropic, showing minimal vertical variation.
I looked up at my wife, pressed my lips together and shook my head. "What is it?" she asked without looking up. "The visible cloud tops are largely barotropic," I said, gently slapping my knees in a gesture of emphatic resignation, "showing minimal vertical variation."
Meanwhile, hundreds of exoplanets are now thought to be larger than previously estimated, including several "earthlike" worlds. Our presumptively regular-human descendents will have to find somewhere else to live. Sky and Telescope:
Only three of the single planet systems found by TESS so far were ear-marked as similar in size to our planet. Now all of them are likely to be bigger, perhaps super-Earths instead of genuine imitations of our world. Some of them might even turn out to be larger, gaseous planets more akin to Uranus and Neptune than Earth.
"This has important implications for our understanding of exoplanets, including . . . prioritization for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope," says team member Paul Robertson (University of California, Irvine).
The size and shape of Jupiter [Nature Astronomy]
