OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Thirty SPIRALS

I can't believe I haven't talked about spirals yet.  One of my favorite subjects.

This is prompted by the discovery of cyclones on the poles of Juno, a moon of Jupiter.   The Juno spacecraft is busy doing fly-byes and collecting all sorts of exciting discoveries about the big gas planet.   One of the things they are trying to discover is if Jupiter has a solid core, but what they have discovered is the presence of potentially earth-like water on one of its moons and now cyclones and brilliant auroras on Juno its major moon.

Cyclone's on Juno's pole - NASA 

Juno Spaceship pole to pole orbits - NASA

"We're all jumping up and down with huge excitement," says team member Fran Bagenal, professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"The results are really quite fabulous," she says. "And they're fabulous because they're not what we expected. If we just saw what we expected, it would be 'ho hum, ho hum, that's good but, you know,' ... Seeing puzzles and mysteries and getting us all excited wondering what we are seeing is more exciting."

Some of those puzzles and mysteries are pretty obscure. For example, there's some startling new data about the spectacular auroras at the poles of Jupiter — which are like the Northern Lights on Earth but much more dazzling.

These auroras are caused by energetic particles streaming along Jupiter's magnetic field lines, and Bagenal says there should be strong electrical currents associated with all those streaming particles.

"But we haven't detected the magnetic field perturbation associated with them," she says, a detail perhaps important only to people who've spent their entire lives studying Jupiter.   Reported by Joe Palca, National Public Radio

Cyclones are of course spirals and spirals are an ever present form in the cosmic construction of the universe.  They can be found in the shape of our DNA, the shape of galaxies and plant and animal forms.  The spiral is the path of energy and has the mathematical formation of the Fibonacci sequence where every number in the sequence is the sum of the two before: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55...    Also known as the Golden Ratio, this universal formula has fascinated mathematicians, biologists, philosophers, and artists for centuries because of its natural proportional appeal and its ubiquitous presence.   Spirals are common symbols in energy healing and in many mystical beliefs. Now we can see them on Juno.