Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a major storm that has persisted for at least 190 years.
Enhanced image by Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran (CC BY-NC-SA) based on images provided Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Researchers may have solved the mystery of the Great Red Spot, a massive storm swirling above Jupiter’s surface.
Astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini first observed a vortex over the same region of Jupiter in 1665 and named it the ‘Permanent Spot’ – but scientists weren’t sure if it was the same storm as the one we see today. This is evident from a new study published this month in Geophysical research lettersresearchers analyzed historical observations of the site and determined that the two storms are likely different.
“From the size and motion measurements, we concluded that it is highly unlikely that today’s Great Red Spot was the ‘Permanent Spot’ observed by Cassini,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. who led the investigation, said in a statement. “The ‘Permanent Spot’ probably disappeared sometime between the mid-18th and 19th centuries, in which case we can now say that the lifespan of the Red Spot is more than 190 years.”
Scott Bolton, a physicist at the Southwest Research Institute who was not involved in the study, says New scientistLeah Crane says it’s difficult to draw conclusions from the hand-drawn photographs that researchers partially relied on for early data about the site.
“What I think we might be seeing is not so much that the storm went away and then another one came in almost the same place – it would be a very big coincidence if the storm happened at exactly the same latitude, or even at a similar place.” latitude,” says Bolton New scientist. “It could be that what we’re really seeing is the evolution of the storm.”
After Cassini first spotted Jupiter’s spot, astronomers continued to observe it until 1713, when the so-called Permanent Spot appeared to disappear. “No astronomer of that time reported any location at that latitude for 118 years,” Sánchez-Lavega says Mashableby Mark Kaufman. Another site was not reported until 1831, but scientists have been monitoring it ever since.
The present site has decreased from a length of 39,200 miles in 1879 to about 8,700 miles today. But that’s still longer than the diameter of the Earth (just over 12,000 kilometers). The storm’s wind speeds could reach up to 400 miles per hour, and scientists are still unsure how chemicals in the atmosphere could be giving the storm its red hue, NASA said.
For the new study, researchers used drawings of the original site, as well as drawings of the new site from the period 1831 to 1879, photographs from 1879 to 1980 and digital images from 1980 to 2023.
“I like articles like this that delve deeper into pre-photographic observations,” Michael Wong, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who did not contribute to the findings, told CNN’s Ashley Strickland.
The centuries of data allowed the scientists to analyze how the size and movement of the storms changed over time. Early drawings indicated that the Permanent Spot was much smaller than its current location, meaning it would have had to grow at an atypical pace for a Jupiter storm to reach the size of the Great Red Spot in the 19th century. New scientist writes. Moreover, the storm now appears to be subsiding.
The researchers also explored possible explanations for the formation of the Great Red Spot by running simulations of storm behavior in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The most likely scenario was that instability in the planet’s intense atmospheric winds caused the storm, the statement said.
Future research will investigate how the site has remained relatively stable over a long period of time and how it might evolve in the future.
“We don’t know what the future of the [Great Red Spot] is,” says Sánchez-Lavega Mashable. It may fall apart if it continues to shrink, or “it may reach a stable size and last a long time.”