Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’ storm still shrinking, Researchers say

In a given year, Jupiter experiences its share of storms, cloudy days and changes in atmospheric chemistry. A collection of powerful storms that are bigger than the size of Earth, the Great Red Spot isn’t as big as it used to be, and recent observations have noted that the color has been shifting from red to orange. Furthermore, the video also shows off a number of interesting discoveries that NASA has made about Jupiter through the use of the Hubble telescope.

Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was of the view that whenever they have given a look at Jupiter, they have been surprised and were left wondering that something exciting is going on and this time as well the same has happened.

Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, a large series of high resolution photos show Jupiter like you’ve rarely seen it before and NASA has taken the trouble to compile these photos into a single smooth 4K UHD video of the vast stormy planet which lies at the inner frontier of our outer Solar System. “This time is no exception”.

Simon and her fellow researchers produced two global maps of Jupiter using images captured by Hubble’s Wide-Field Camera 3.

Thus far, the new images have revealed that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a giant spinning storm resembling a hurricane, is still shrinking and becoming more circular. The long axis of this characteristic storm is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) shorter now than it was in 2014.

It’s unknown exactly what the filament inside the Giant Red Spot represents, but NASA reports that “this filamentary streamer rotates and twists…getting distorted by winds blowing at 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second) or even greater speeds”.

In Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt, the researchers found an elusive wave that had been spotted on the planet only once before, decades earlier, by Voyager 2. It seems to travel at about 16 degrees north latitude, towards a region that beholds cyclones and anticyclones, as the wave is barely watchable.

“The long-term value of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program is really exciting”, said co-author Michael H. Wong of the University of California, Berkeley.

“The new Hubble maps are an extraordinarily valuable part of that effort”, said Glenn Orton, a co-author on the paper from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The wave, however, is a very real thing, and is believed to be much like baroclinic waves on Earth which are typically found near the formation grounds of cyclones up in Earth’s atmosphere. Potentially this wave forms beneath the clouds, where we cannot see it, but occasionally propagates up to the cloud deck where we can see it. This idea is supported by the distance between the wave crests.