Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have found previously unseen structures and activity in Jupiter’s atmosphere above the Great Red Spot. These strange features appear to be caused by powerful atmospheric gravity waves.
The Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system, twice the size of Earth, and is believed to have raged for at least 300 years, according to NASA. The Great Red Spot’s winds blow about 270 to 425 miles per hour (430 to 680 kilometers per hour), up to 3.5 times faster than a tornado here on Earth.
However, despite the age, size and power of the storm, scientists had actually suspected that Jupiter’s atmosphere above the Great Red Spot wasn’t all that interesting. However, these new observations from JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, which observed the massive red-hot storm in July 2022, show that this assumption couldn’t be more wrong.
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“We thought this region, perhaps naively, would be really boring,” team leader Henrik Melin of the University of Leicester said in a statement. “It is, in fact, just as interesting as the northern lights, if not more so. Jupiter never ceases to amaze.”
What secrets has the Great Red Spot been hiding?
Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is the point at which the planet’s lower atmosphere meets its magnetic field. This leads to the bright northern and southern lights, powered by bombardment from charged particles from the sun and fueled by sprays of volcanic material erupting from the Jovian moon Io, the most active volcanic body in the solar system.
Jupiter may be one of the brightest objects in the night sky above Earth, easily visible in clear skies. However, apart from its northern and southern lights, the atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet shines only faintly, making it difficult for ground-based telescopes to see Earth’s atmosphere in detail.
From JWST’s position a million miles from Earth, our planet’s atmosphere is no obstacle for this $10 billion space telescope. In addition, JWST’s sensitivity in the infrared spectrum allows it to see the gas giant’s atmosphere in intricate detail, including the region above the Great Red Spot.
With the goal of finding out if this region is a bit dull, Melin and colleagues targeted it with NIRSpec, JWST’s flagship instrument. This led to the discovery of a variety of intricate structures across JWST’s field of view, including dark arcs and bright spots.
Although incident sunlight is responsible for most of the light seen from Jupiter’s atmosphere, the team thinks there must be another that is causing changes in the shape and structure of the Jovian upper atmosphere.
“One way you can change this structure is by gravity waves — similar to waves crashing on a beach, creating ripples in the sand,” Melin explained. “These waves are created deep in the turbulent lower atmosphere around the Great Red Spot, and they can travel up in altitude, changing the structure and emissions of the upper atmosphere.”
These gravity waves are very different from gravitational waves, the latter are small ripples in space and time predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1915 theory of general relativity. Gravitational waves propagate through an atmosphere, compared to the structure of space-time as gravitational the waves do.
These atmospheric gravity waves are also seen on Earth from time to time, but these Earth-bound waves are much less intense and more powerful than the same phenomenon that occurs on Jupiter.
The team now hopes to follow up on the discovery of these newly found features of the Great Red Spot and the intricate wave patterns that underlie them with JWST. This future investigation could reveal how the waves flow through the gas giant’s upper atmosphere and how this causes the observed structures to move.
The findings are expected to help better understand the energy distribution across Jupiter and could help support the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission.
JUICE launched on April 14, 2023 and will reach Jupiter and its moons in 2031 when it will make detailed observations of Jupiter and its three large oceanic moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
The team’s results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Originally posted on Space.com.
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