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Many mysteries hide beneath the beautifully chaotic clouds of Jupiter, but with the help of nifty astronomical techniques and NASA's Juno spacecraft, one of the biggest puzzles on the giant planet could be resolved.
As we know, water is the key to life on Earth. Our efforts to search for life on other worlds depend on the detection of this important compound. Although scientists do not think that life lives in Jupiter, finding a Jovian reservoir is one of the most pressing problems in global science. The location of this water will help us understand how the solar system and Jupiter itself have evolved. Unfortunately, Jupiter was notoriously bad by revealing all deep water in its thick atmosphere, leaving scientists and their planetary formation models high and dry.
Before we sent a spacecraft to study Jupiter, the scientists assumed that the gas giant would contain large amounts of H2O. The logic was simple: the earth is covered with wet matter, and there is a lot of water in the different moons that revolve around the giant planets. Jupiter, the most massive and dominant planet in the solar system, had to trap the lion's share of the solar system's water by the time it was formed billions of years ago.
This logic was broken in 1995 when NASA 's Galileo mission launched a probe into the atmosphere of the planet to measure its composition. To everyone's surprise, there was an incredible lack of water. The Galileo probe may not have detected water simply because it was dropped in the wrong place. It's as if the probe was parachuted onto a desert on Earth. It's not that there is no water on our planet, it's just that the deserts are not known to be overgrown with things. The atmosphere of Jupiter is dynamic, with jets, storms and a non-homogeneous composition; the probe could only clear the atmosphere it was crossing at this place – and this place could have been as dry as the desert.
However, the situation changed when the researchers used the powerful MW. Keck's observatory and NASA's infrared telescope installation on Hawaii's Mauna Kea plunges its eyes into Jupiter's biggest storm, the Great Red Spot. They published their filled news of water in an August 2018 study published in the Astrophysical Journal and led by astrophysicist Gordon L. Bjoraker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"The moons that orbit around Jupiter are mostly made up of water ice, so the whole neighborhood has a lot of water," Bjoraker said in a statement from NASA. "Why is the planet – which is this huge gravity well, where everything falls into it – not so rich in water?"
To investigate, the Bjoraker team measured the infrared radiation from the depths of the clouds. Specifically, they studied the spectrum of infrared absorption of a certain type of methane known to exist in a vapor across the planet. This infrared radiation should cross the clouds unhindered, but if clouds were present, this radiation would be blocked. When analyzing the sightings of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the researchers found that three distinct layers of cloud blocked the passage of this infrared signal into the atmosphere, which was consistent with theoretical predictions. the presence of clouds rich in water. They also detected large amounts of carbon monoxide, suggesting that there is a lot of oxygen (O) available in the Jupiter atmosphere to chemically bind to molecular hydrogen ( H2) to form water (H2O).
The next step is to use this data to supplement Juno's observations of Jupiter. The spacecraft can make spectroscopic observations even more deeply in the atmosphere of Jupiter and it will do it for the whole planet, not just the Great Red Spot. But if Juno also detected this possible layer of water cloud, the techniques developed by the Bjoraker team using telescopes on Earth would have been effective in finding deep water to Jupiter, solving the water mystery of gaseous giant. These techniques could then be used to deeply probe the atmospheres of other planets.
"If it works, then maybe we could apply it somewhere else, like Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune, where we do not have Juno," said Amy Simon, co-author of the paper. study and specialist of planetary atmospheres.
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