What's happening to Jupiter's Great Red Spot?
30 September 2021
/Lauren Fuge
The winds of one of the Solar System’s biggest storms are speeding up, and no one yet knows why.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team.
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a vast storm that has been raging for at least 150 years, and new analysis shows that its winds are changing.
The storm is an anticyclone big enough to swallow our entire planet, with massive, crimson-coloured clouds spinning in an anticlockwise direction. The winds raging on the outer edge are more than twice as intense as a Category 5 cyclone on Earth, while the winds within the storm are cruising around more slowly.
Now, a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research has found that the outer winds have sped up.
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope from 2009 to 2020, the research team found that mean wind speeds in the Great Red Spot have increased by 4% to 8%.
More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/whats-happening-to-jupiters-great-red-spot/
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