NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected mysterious changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

NASA’s most powerful space telescope, Hubble, has documented a mysterious change in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

The place is a raging cyclone 10,000 miles wide enough to swallow the Earth. It has been shrinking and becoming more circular since astronomers began to observe it about 150 years ago. But no one could keep up with the speed of its spiraling movement until Hubble turned its eye to the distant orange dot in 2009.

Planetologists Michael Wong and Amy Simon recently analyzed a decade of Hubble data on the Great Red Spot’s wind speed, which can exceed 400 miles per hour. NASA said Monday that its research suggests the cyclone’s outer band is accelerating: its wind speeds have increased by up to 8% from 2009 to 2020. At the same time, its inner region has slowed significantly.

“When I saw the results for the first time, I asked, ‘Does this make sense? “No one has ever seen this before,” said Wong, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, in a press release. “But it’s something only Hubble can do. Hubble’s longevity and continuous observations make this revelation possible. “

Overall, the average wind speed at the spot is increasing, but only a tiny bit – less than 1.6 miles per hour per earth year. No one yet knows what the changing winds are telling us about the storm as a whole.

“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 story continues

Wong, Simon and other researchers first published their results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month.

The Great Red Spot is a mystery

Researchers still don’t understand much about the Great Red Spot, including how long it will last.

The storm survived so long because it is stuck between two jet streams – bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere – that move in different directions. These “fuel the vortex with momentum,” NASA scientist Glenn Orton previously told Insider.

Some scientists have suggested that the storm would collapse and disappear in just a few decades due to its reduced size. Others disagree.

Philip Marcus, a UC Berkeley researcher who co-authored the new study with Wong and Simon, argued that “the Great Red Spot is not in danger of going away.”

“To understand the health of the spot, planetologists need to study the health of its vortex, not its cloud; the shrinking cloud is not a harbinger of death,” Marcus wrote on Astronomy.com in 2019. “Based on the interactions of the spot with other vortices found by my Berkeley group, there is no evidence that this vortex itself has changed in size or intensity.”

Meanwhile, other data also reveals surprises, including the fact that the big red spot grows as it shrinks.

Then last year, images from Hubble and the Gemini Ground Observatory revealed holes in the cyclone’s cloud cover. Scientists also used these images, combined with data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, to map lightning in the Great Red Spot.

“Because we now regularly have these high-resolution views from a few different observatories and wavelengths, we are learning so much more about Jupiter’s weather,” Simon said in a NASA statement about the discovery. ‘last year. “It’s our equivalent of a weather satellite. We can finally start looking at weather cycles.”

Read the original article on Business Insider