“No One Has Ever Seen This Before” – Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Are Accelerating

“When I initially saw the results, I asked ‘Does this make sense?’ No one has ever seen this before,” said Michael Wong of the
Each loop in this video represents approximately 10 Earth hours or one Jupiter day, approximating what it would look like if the Great Red Spot were constantly illuminated. By analyzing this set of data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, researchers were able to simulate what the wind flow looks like around Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: just south of the Great Red Spot is an eastward jet and at the southern border is a westward jet. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley)

“We find that the average wind speed in the Great Red Spot has been slightly increasing over the past decade,” Wong added. “We have one example where our analysis of the two-dimensional wind map found abrupt changes in 2017 when there was a major convective storm nearby.”

To better analyze Hubble’s bounty of data, Wong took a new approach to his data analysis. He used software to track tens to hundreds of thousands of wind vectors (directions and speeds) each time Jupiter was observed by Hubble. “It gave me a much more consistent set of velocity measurements,” Wong explained. “I also ran a battery of statistical tests to confirm if it was justified to call this an increase in wind speed. It is.”

What does the increase in speed mean? “That’s hard to diagnose, since Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data,” explained Wong. “But it’s an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what’s fueling the Great Red Spot and how it’s maintaining energy.” There’s still a lot of work to do to fully understand it.

This three-dimensional model of Jupiter was computer-generated from a new global map of the planet that was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 on June 27, 2019, when the planet was 644 million kilometers from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), M. Kornmesser

Astronomers have pursued ongoing studies of the “king” of solar system storms since the 1870s. The Great Red Spot is an upwelling of material from Jupiter’s interior. If seen from the side, the storm would have a tiered wedding cake structure with high clouds at the center cascading down to its outer layers. Astronomers have noted that it is shrinking in size and becoming more circular than oval in observations spanning more than a century. The current diameter is 10,000 miles across, meaning that Earth could still fit inside it.

In addition to observing this legendary, long-lived storm, researchers have observed storms on other planets, including DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093982

The majority of the data to support this research came from Hubble’s Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which provides annual Hubble global views of the outer planets that allow astronomers to look for changes in the planets’ storms, winds, and clouds.

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