John Carlos Baez on Nostr: There's a new theory that "mushballs" created in huge thunderstorms on Jupiter are ...

There's a new theory that "mushballs" created in huge thunderstorms on Jupiter are pulling down lots of ammonia... explaining the shortage of ammonia in the top 150 kilometers of the atmosphere.

Pretty cool, but I'd wait for some more confirmation before I completely buy this. The picture here is just theoretical. In fact even the proponents of this theory had a lot of doubts - which is good:

"Imke and I both were like, 'There's no way in the world this is true,'" said Moeckel, who received his UC Berkeley Ph.D. last year and is now a researcher at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. "So many things have to come together to actually explain this, it seems so exotic. I basically spent three years trying to prove this wrong. And I couldn't prove it wrong."

For more, check out this:

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-jupiter-enigmatic-weather-mushball-phenomenon.html