Hubble Telescope spies stormy weather and a shrinking Great Crimson Area on Jupiter (video)

The gas giant Jupiter steals the reveal in these two unusual portraits of the planet’s opposing faces, displaying the swirling storms and tumultuous cloud bands blown by winds raging at tons of of miles per hour.

The Hubble Space Telescope took these images on Jan. 5-6, 2024. Jupiter rotates once each 10 hours, Hubble was able to image one hemisphere with the famous Great Crimson Area visible, and wait for the several hemisphere to return into ogle earlier than imaging that.

The latest images reveal that Jupiter is at the second experiencing some action. “The many large storms and small white clouds are a hallmark of a lot of activity going on in Jupiter’s atmosphere legal now,” said Simon in a press statement. 

Related: Mystery of Jupiter’s Great Blue Area deepens with strangely fluctuating jet

Jupiter passed via perihelion — its closest point in its orbit around the sun — on 21 January 2023, and it appears that a year later the extra solar heating of Jovian summer season is peaceful stirring up its atmosphere.

The gas giant’s most distinctive feature is its dark and mild banding, visible via even a four-streak back-garden telescope. With Hubble’s vision, we examine each detail of those bands. The lighter bands are called ‘zones’ and are areas the place the atmosphere is rising. The darker bands are referred to as ‘belts’ and are areas the place the atmosphere is sinking. All the atmosphere is undulating as it rotates around Jupiter, but it absolutely doesn’t rise or sink too a lot — the clouds are only about 30 miles (50km) deep, which is a shallow layer compared to the relaxation of the atmosphere that extends tens of thousands of miles deep.

In one hemisphere we can examine the famous Great Crimson Area, which has been raging for at least nearly 200 years, and reasonably maybe for a lot longer if observations by English astronomer Robert Hooke and the Italian Giovanni Cassini and 1664–5 have been of the same storm. Then again, there’s a titanic question mark over the Great Crimson Area’s continued longevity, because it is shrinking at an alarming rate.

In the late nineteenth century the Great Crimson Area was measured to be about 25,500 miles (41,000 km) across, with adequate area to squeeze three Earths internal of it. Then again, when the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Jupiter in 1979 they measured that the Great Crimson Area to be 14,500 miles (23,300 km) in diameter; by 1995, when Hubble considered Jupiter, its diameter had decreased to 13,020 miles (20,950km). 

In 2014 it was 10,250 miles (16,500 km); in 2021 legal 9,165 miles (14,750 km); and in November 2023 ace amateur astrophotographer Damian Peach measured it to be 7,770 miles (12,500km). The Great Crimson Area has gone from being a vast oval titanic adequate to fit three Earths, to being circular and not even large adequate to fit a single Earth (which has a diameter of seven,926 miles (12,756 km).

The cause of this shrinking remains a thriller. Is the Great Crimson Area going to blow itself out, or will it bag a second wind at some point? One of the functions of OPAL is to track the Great Crimson Area and monitor the way it is changing to attempt and determine what’s happening to it.

Nevertheless, its measurement is peaceful impressive — a vast storm the scale of our planet, with roots 500km (~300 miles) deep in the Jovian atmosphere and with winds raging at between 430 and 680 kilometers per hour (267–422 mph)!

The Great Crimson Area just will not be the only red region on Jupiter, nonetheless. In the late Nineties three ‘white ovals’ — smaller storms that had been seen at some stage in the twentieth century — merged to invent a unusual storm called Oval BA. Then, in 2006 Oval BA turned red, prompting the nickname ‘Crimson Area Junior’. It too has decreased in measurement somewhat over the years, and can be considered beneath and to the legal of the Great Crimson Area in Hubble’s image.

What makes the storms flip red is another unanswered thriller. Evidently it is to achieve with chemistry, maybe captivating the dredging up of phosphorous or sulfur, or organic molecules that react with solar ultraviolet mild once they stand up into the cloud deck. 

At first glance the several hemisphere appears a tiny extra bland without the 2 titanic, main red spots to spice issues up, but on nearer inspection there is masses going on. In the planet’s North Equatorial Belt (the first red band north of the equator) we can examine two smaller storms, one deep red, another a paler red, bumping subsequent to each different. The deep red storm is a cyclone, meaning that it is rotating counterclockwise in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, whereas its paler companion is an anticyclone, which is rotating in a clockwise direction. Because they are swirling in reverse directions they won’t merge, but rather will jump off each different.

And as an added bonus, on the left hand facet of the image end to the limb of the South Equatorial Belt, we can examine Jupiter’s innermost moon, the volcanic and fiery Io. 

Hubble’s portraits of Jupiter, and the several gas giants, have transform an annual tournament as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, headed up by planetary scientist Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Heart. With the assist of both Hubble and an army of amateur astronomers all around the arena, OPAL is able to maintain tabs on the giant planets and monitor activity of their atmosphere.

Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a stage in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He’s the author of “The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and web sites.