An analysis of images spanning hundreds of years suggests a dark spot spied in the late 1600s and early 1700s is distinct from the Red Spot seen today.
Jupiter’s signature feature — its Great Red Spot — might not be the same dark spot seen on the giant planet more than three centuries ago.
Luckily, some planet observers of the past sketched what they saw through their telescopes. “It was very exciting to see in old articles and books the descriptions of the observations and drawings that astronomers made with great precision,” says Agustín Sánchez‐Lavega, an astronomer and planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.
“That’s very compelling, and they’ve done a really good job,” says Timothy Dowling, a planetary scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. To produce a spot the size of the early Great Red Spot requires the consolidation of vortices that are themselves as large as the Red Spot was back then. This is unlikely, the team reports, as such features would have been spotted. Meanwhile, simulations of a giant thunderstorm failed to produce a spot as large as the early Great Red Spot.).
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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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