NASA Suspects Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is 'A Massive Heat Source'
- 8 years ago
The highly visible Great Red Spot on Jupiter could be a heat source, finds a recently published study.
The highly visible Great Red Spot on Jupiter could be a heat source, finds a recently published study.
A NASA article about the new research explains that “Scientists have been stumped as to why temperatures in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere are comparable to those found at Earth, yet Jupiter is more than five times the distance from the sun.”
So a team from Boston University “set out to solve the mystery by mapping temperatures well above Jupiter’s cloud tops using observations from Earth.”
The paper’s lead author James O’Donoghue is quoted as saying, “We could see almost immediately that our maximum temperatures at high altitudes were above the Great Red Spot far below.”
The researchers believe that the heat is caused when gravity and acoustic waves produced by the spot’s inner storm “collide and heat the upper atmosphere.”
As the NASA release states, “This effect has been observed over the Andes Mountains here on Earth and may also be happening elsewhere in the outer solar system, though it has not been directly observed.”
The agency’s Juno spacecraft is expected to provide additional information about the Great Red Spot as it explores Jupiter over a period of 20 months.
The highly visible Great Red Spot on Jupiter could be a heat source, finds a recently published study.
A NASA article about the new research explains that “Scientists have been stumped as to why temperatures in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere are comparable to those found at Earth, yet Jupiter is more than five times the distance from the sun.”
So a team from Boston University “set out to solve the mystery by mapping temperatures well above Jupiter’s cloud tops using observations from Earth.”
The paper’s lead author James O’Donoghue is quoted as saying, “We could see almost immediately that our maximum temperatures at high altitudes were above the Great Red Spot far below.”
The researchers believe that the heat is caused when gravity and acoustic waves produced by the spot’s inner storm “collide and heat the upper atmosphere.”
As the NASA release states, “This effect has been observed over the Andes Mountains here on Earth and may also be happening elsewhere in the outer solar system, though it has not been directly observed.”
The agency’s Juno spacecraft is expected to provide additional information about the Great Red Spot as it explores Jupiter over a period of 20 months.