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A decade of Jovian storm chasing has paid off for the Hubble Space Telescope.
The longtime telescope has studied the Great Red Spot – a major storm on Jupiter – which is shrinking for mysterious reasons. Along with this, researchers have just discovered huge changes in wind speed within the massive storm.
Jupiter takes 12 Earth years to orbit the sun. During the Jovian year between 2009 and 2020, according to Hubble, winds in the outer ring of the Great Red Spot increased by up to 8%. As the wind speed varied depending on when Hubble viewed the storm, the telescope tracked long-term increases in the speed of the outer ring’s rotation.
Related: Photos of the great red spot of Jupiter, the biggest storm in the solar system
A typical outer ring wind speed today easily exceeds 100 meters per second (223 mph or 360 km / h), whereas ten years ago the range often reached 90 meters per second (around 200 mph or 324 km / h.)
The storm is larger than planet Earth, and astronomers have observed it regularly for over 150 years – with other occasional sightings as early as the 1600s – providing evidence of change over a relatively long period of time. Storm speeds are incredible compared to what we see on Earth, but at Jupiter, the typical increase was less than 1.6 mph (2.6 km / h) per Earth year, the researchers said in a statement. .
“When I saw the results for the first time, I asked: Does this make sense? “No one has seen this before,” “senior author Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in the statement.
But Wong and other researchers said the precision and long-lasting recordings of the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations provided sufficient confirmation, as well as software data analysis that followed tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. of wind vectors (directions and speeds) during Jupiter observations.
Researchers are struggling to understand why this increase is happening, as Hubble cannot peer into the depths of the storm. “Anything below 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.”
NASA is currently leading the Juno mission to Jupiter which occasionally examined the Great Red Spot, but the press release did not say whether the observations from that mission could help understand the mystery of the wind. Juno has previously worked in tandem with Hubble and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to map atmospheric conditions and storms on the giant planet. Juno also peered deep into the Great Red Spot to trace the depths of the storm.
Most of the research comes from Hubble’s Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which allows the telescope to monitor weather conditions on outer planets by committing to observations at least once a year. The program includes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and also provides context on how huge exoplanets can function, as they are well outside of our solar system and beyond close observation with current technology.
A research-based article was published last month in Geophysical Research Letters.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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