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

Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

By analyzing images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope between 2009 and 2020, researchers found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the Great Red Spot, set off by the outer green circle, have increased by up to 8 percent and exceed 640 kilometers per hour. In contrast, the winds near the storm’s innermost region, set off by a smaller green ring, are moving significantly more slowly. Both move counterclockwise. Credit: NASA, ESA, Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley)

The Winds at the Outer Edge Are ‘Winning the Race’ in This Enormous Storm System

Listen up, race fans! The innermost lane no longer has a predictable advantage. In

Like the speed of an advancing race car driver, the winds in the outermost “lane” of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are accelerating – a discovery only made possible by

Jupiter and Europa 2020

This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometers from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing color — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), and the OPAL team

“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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