New research suggests the Great Red Spot we see on Jupiter today is an entirely different giant storm from the one astronomers observed more than three centuries ago
A view of Jupiter's south temperate belt and Great Red Spot, as captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on December 30, 2020.This lushly red oval is obvious even through small telescopes, looking like a baleful eye staring out from the enormous gas giant planet. The is so huge that you could drop the entire Earth into it and our planet would plunge through without touching the sides.
Unlike Earth’s hurricanes that can wander across sizable swaths of our planet, storms on Jupiter tend to stay in their latitudinal lane, confined by powerful jet streams. That confinement also sustains the GRS, making the storm extremely long-lived, but its actual age has been an ongoing astronomical enigma.spotted—so to speak—a dark oval on Jupiter’s face. It was seen on and off again until 1713, and the recorded location of this “permanent spot” was the same as that of the current GRS.
NASA/ESA/A. Simon/Goddard Space Flight Center/M. H. Wong/University of California, Berkeley ; The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo ; the first photograph ever taken of it, by Irish astronomer Agnes Mary Clerke in 1879, shows it as a flattened oval with a longitudinal width of around 40,000 kilometers—more than double the width of the more circular storm we see today.
Another formation mechanism could be a superstorm, an upwelling of warmer material from Jupiter’s depths that punches out to the cloud tops. Such an immense storm erupted on Saturn in 2010,that faded to faintness over a year or two. Simulating such an event on Jupiter, the scientists found that this could form a single anticyclonic system, but, like the merging vortices, a singular upwelling of material couldn’t scale up to reach the GRS’s observed size and shape.
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James Webb Space Telescope spies strange shapes above Jupiter's Great Red Spot (image)Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.
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