Hubble telescope reveals changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Newly released images of Jupiter show the planet orbiting in a 4K video from NASA and the European Space Agency.

Similar to the way schools make pictures every year of children, NASA scientists are making annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.

Jupiter’s trademark red spot is actually a very long duration storm that has been rumbling south of the planet’s equatorial region for at least 300 years, since before the dawn of modern astronomy. The observations reveal a rare wave in the atmosphere that hasn’t been seen since Voyager 2 captured it decades ago and a new filament in the Great Red Spot that’s never been seen before. The spot appears more orange than red now and images show a wispy filament around the vortex not seen before.

The two new maps were captured by Hubble’s high-performance Wide Field Camera 3 and analyzed by planetary scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Watch the animation above to see the latest findings on Jupiter. The observations are created to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry.

“This time is no exception”, she says. Further evidence shows that there may be a a calm within the storm-that is, the Great Red Spot itself is reportedly shrinking in size. But now, the rate of shrinkage seems to be slowing again, even though the spot is still about 150 miles (240 kilometres) smaller than it was in 2014.

One theory suggests that these are baroclinic waves, which often form in the Earth’s atmosphere as cyclones begin to form.

“Until now, we thought the wave seen by Voyager 2 might have been a fluke”, Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. The wave is situated in an area replete with cyclones and anticylones.

In addition to Jupiter, the researchers have observed Neptune and Uranus, and maps of those planets also will be placed in the public archive. The collection of maps that will be built up over time will help scientists not only to understand the atmospheres of giant planets in the solar system, but also the atmospheres of our own planet and of the planets that are being discovered around other stars.