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If you have seen pictures of the beautiful “king” of our solar system — Jupiter -you must have noticed a giant crimson spot on the planet. The spot is actually a storm, raging with a speed of 643 km/h, so gigantic that it could completely engulf Earth. Now, scientists at NASA and the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States, have discovered that the winds in the outer “lanes” of the storm are speeding up. The winds in the innermost location of the storm, on the other hand, are slowing down.
According to the researchers, the outer winds of the storm have sped up by eight per cent from 2009 to 2020, amounting to a change of 2.5 km/h, which is relatively small.
Using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope over 11 years, scientists were able to detect the changes in the spot and analyse the changes in speed and direction each time Hubble observed Jupiter. Then, they ran a series of statistical tests to make sure the observation was real.
About what the changes could mean, Michael Wong, who led the analysis, said in a statement, “That’s hard to diagnose since Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well.” According to Wong, anything below the top of the gas clouds are invisible in Hubble’s data. Still, he thinks that the discovery can help us understand more about what is fuelling the giant red storm.
According to scientists, the change is so small that if they did not have eleven years of data, it would be undetectable. “With Hubble, we have the precision we need to spot a trend,” said Amy Simon, one of the authors of the study and NASA scientist, in the statement. Measuring the wind speeds of Jupiter’s storm is not easy because unlike Earth, which is constantly being monitored by satellites for weather, Jupiter is not observed so closely. Still, Hubble can see the storm features as small as 160 km.
The study was published in the September 20 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
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