Jupiter’s big red spot spins faster

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope monitors Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a 10,000-mile-wide storm system that has been swirling for at least 190 years and possibly much longer. Recent data from the telescope indicate that the winds outside the spot have picked up speed over the past decade.

The storm has an “outer path” and an “inner path” of winds, both of which rotate counterclockwise. While the outer track has accelerated recently, the winds closer to the center of the place were present.ally much slower in 2020 than they were in 2009. Research exploring these wind trends has been published last month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Because we don’t have a storm chaser plane in Jupiter, we can’t continuously measure the winds there,” Amy Simon, planetologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA statement. . Press release. “Hubble is the only telescope that has the kind of temporal coverage and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter’s winds in this detail.”

The recovery of wind speed was constant: less than a 2– change of miles per hour per terrestrial year from 2009 to 2020. It was only because the team had 11 years of Hubble data and Hubble can see Jupiter with such precision that they were able to identify the trend. The winds blow on about 400 miles per hour, slightly slower than the cruising speed of a commercial airliner.

Although Jupiter appears serene in the images — a large marble in space—the planet is a constantly moving cloudy ball of gas. Just last year a brand new spot arose on the planet. And despite all its fame, even the Great Red Spot is a kind of enigma; our modern instruments cannot sound much of the storm other than what is happening on the area.

“Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below cloud tops is invisible in the data, ”said Michael Wong, a planetary atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and lead author of the article, in the same release. Wong added that the recent trend is “an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what is fueling the Great Red Spot and how it maintains energy.”

Planetologists know a few things about this place. It has a tiered structure in which the higher storm clouds are towards the center and outer edges of the storm are deeper in the planet. The storm is slowly becoming more circular in relation to the oval than it has long been.

Storm he ownshas been observed for nearly 200 years – maybe even 350 years, as it’s hard to say whether the spots described by previous astronomers were the same as the great red spot – but it will likely take more time and better instruments to dig deeper into the stormy mystery at the heart of Jupiter.

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