Discovery of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter Confuses NASA Scientists

The Great Red Spot, a storm on Jupiter that is observed, has seen activity for more than 150 years. Makes it spin faster and confuses scientists.

"When I first saw the results, I asked 'Does this make sense?' No one had seen this before," said Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research.

The wind, which rotates counterclockwise around the eddies, which are larger than Earth at over 400mph, has increased by up to 8% from 2009 to 2020.

However, this increase only occurs in the so-called high-speed storm rings. Surprisingly, winds near the center slowed, according to observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Changes that would not be visible without Hubble, amounting to less than 1.6 miles per hour per Earth year, as quoted from Sky News, Wednesday (29/09/2021).

"We're talking about small changes so if you didn't have 11 years of Hubble data, we wouldn't know it was happening," said Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Amy Simon added that Hubble is the only telescope that has the temporal scope and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter's winds in detail.

Gas Giant

Dr Michael added: "This is something only Hubble can do. Hubble's longevity and ongoing observations made this revelation possible."

The Great Red Spot is believed to be material from the interior of the gas giant and has been observed since the 1870s, although it may have been spotted as early as 1665. Then, gaps in observations mean it's unclear whether it's the same place or not.

Scientists daftar togel online believe that the storm is shrinking and becoming more circular, with a current diameter of more than 10,000 miles still large enough to contain the entire planet Earth. However, the cause of the increase in wind speed is very difficult to determine, said Dr Michael.

"Because Hubble can't see the bottom of the storm very well, anything below the cloud top isn't visible in the data," he explained.

According to him, it is a piece of data that can help them understand what triggered the Great Red Spot to occur, and how it retains energy.

"There is still a lot of work to be done to fully understand it."