Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers discovered never-before-seen 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 been raging for at least 300 years, according to NASA. The Great Red Spot’s winds blow at 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.
Yet despite the age, size and power of the storm, scientists actually suspected that Jupiter’s atmosphere above the Great Red Spot wasn’t all that interesting. However, these new observations made by JWST’s Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, which observed the massive Scarlet Storm in July 2022, show that 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. “In fact, it’s just as interesting as the northern lights, if not more so. Jupiter never ceases to amaze.”
What secrets does the Great Red Spot hold?
Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is the point where the planet’s lower atmosphere meets its magnetic field. This results in bright northern and southern auroras powered by a bombardment of 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 on a clear sky. Yet, apart from the northern and southern lights, the atmosphere of the Solar System’s largest planet glows only dimly, making it difficult for ground-based telescopes to see Earth’s atmosphere in detail.
From JWST’s position millions of miles from Earth, our planet’s atmosphere is no obstacle for this $10 billion space telescope. In addition, JWST’s infrared sensitivity allows it to see the gas giant’s atmosphere in intricate detail, including the region above the Great Red Spot.
In order to find out if this region is a bit dull, Melin and his colleagues targeted it with NIRSpec, JWST’s primary instrument. This led to the discovery of various complex structures in 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 believes there must be another that produces changes in the shape and structure of Jovian’s upper atmosphere.
“One of the ways you can change this structure is through gravity waves — similar to waves breaking on the beach, creating ripples in the sand,” Melin explained. “These waves are generated deep in the turbulent lower atmosphere, all around the Great Red Spot, and they can travel upward in height, changing the structure and emissions of the upper atmosphere.”
These gravitational waves are very different from gravitational waves, the latter of which are small ripples in space and time predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity in 1915. Gravitational waves propagate through the atmosphere, unlike the fabric of space-time as a gravitational the waves do.
These atmospheric gravity waves are also observed on Earth from time to time, but these ground waves are much less intense and powerful than the same phenomenon that occurs over Jupiter.
The team now hopes to follow up on the discovery of these newfound features of the Great Red Spot and the complex wave patterns that underlie them with JWST. This future research 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 Jupiter’s energy distribution 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 ocean moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
The team’s results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Originally published on Space.com.
