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Video Winds swirling around the outer edge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have grown stronger over the past decade, reaching speeds of at least 400 miles per hour, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown.
Astronomers have spent more than 150 years observing the iconic feature of Jupiter, a gigantic, oval-shaped splodge measuring more than 10,000 miles in diameter, which is wider than Earth. Flyovers of NASA’s Voyager and Juno spacecraft revealed that the Great Red Spot was made up of swirling red clouds driven by a fierce storm.
The storm is still raging today, and scientists are unsure how. In fact, outward winds have increased eight percent in speed while inland winds are slowing, according to measurements taken by Hubble from 2009 to 2020. The clouds are agitated in a frenzy, spinning counterclockwise. ‘watch around the center of the vortex.
“When I saw the results for the first time, I asked ‘Does this make sense? “No one has ever seen this before,” said Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.
Wong has tracked up to hundreds of thousands of wind vectors and analyzed their changes over a decade using software to determine the increase in wind speed at the edge of the Great Red Spot. It turns out that the wind blows at least 400 miles per hour (180 meters per second).
“What does the increase in speed mean? “It’s hard to diagnose because Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data,” Wong said. “But it’s an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what fuels the Great Red Spot and how it maintains energy.”
The gigantic oval vortex has changed since it was first observed in the 1800s. Not only did the Great Red Spot begin to spin faster, but it also decreased in size and became more and more circular over time.
“I think these two changes are related, but it’s hard to prove or explain that,” Wong said. The register. “At this point, we’re just releasing our new discovery, and maybe future simulation work will help us understand the changes. “
What is fueling these changes, however, remains a mystery as the latest NASA video shows.
Youtube video
It is difficult to study the Great Red Spot. There isn’t much data describing what is happening inside the storm beyond the surface, and the changes can often take a long time to notice.
For example, the changes in the Hubble measurements of the Great Red Spot are relatively small; the wind speed has changed at a rate of only 1.6 miles per hour per earth year. The smallest detail that astronomers can see on the Great Red Spot is 105 miles in diameter, about double the length of the U.S. state of Rhode Island.
“We’re talking about such a small change as if you didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data,” said Amy Simon, a planetologist working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“As we do not have a storm chaser plane in Jupiter, we cannot continuously measure the winds there. Hubble is the only telescope that has the kind of temporal coverage and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter’s winds in this detail. “
Wong believes that studying the physics behind the Great Red Spot will help astronomers understand storms on other planets like Neptune and Saturn.
“Ultimately, all of these dynamic characteristics are powered by heat: solar energy absorbed into the atmosphere warming it and internal heat from deep within the planet. we are therefore studying the big red spot and other characteristics to understand how the atmosphere is driven by this release of heat, ”he concluded. ®
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