New images of Jupiter reveal holes in the Great Red Spot

Jupiter in infrared light, as observed by the International Gemini Observatory on May 29, 2019.

• New images of Jupiter reveal that its Great Red Spot It has holes.
• The infrared portrait of the planet also shows that lightning bolts form alongside turbulent cloud towers 40 miles high (64 km).
• Astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescopethe Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter and the Gemini Observatory on Earth to gather some of the sharpest infrared images on the planet.
• For more stories, visit www.BusinessInsider.co.za.

New snapshots of Jupiter reveal its turbulent infrared weather – the spectrum of light beyond visible wavelengths.

To obtain these unprecedented sharp images, a team of researchers from NASA and the University of California, Berkeley, combined data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter, and the Gemini Observatory on Earth. The team released the images along with a research article in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday.

Along with Jupiter’s new lightning mapping, the images reveal that the dark patches on the planet’s Great Red Spot are holes in its cloud cover, and not different types of clouds.

These images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot were made using data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory on April 1, 2018.

“It’s kind of a bluff,” said Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, about the Great Red Dot in a press release. “You see bright infrared light coming from cloud-free areas, but where there are clouds, it’s very dark in the infrared.”

By studying Jupiter systems with multiple telescopes and spacecraft, scientists can reconstruct the mysteries of the planet’s atmosphere and the history of how it formed.

“Because we now routinely have these high-resolution views of a pair of observatories and different wavelengths, we are learning much more about Jupiter’s climate,” said Amy Simon, NASA planetary scientist, in the statement. “This is our equivalent to a meteorological satellite. We can finally begin to observe climate cycles.”

Images of Earth ‘rival the view from space’

This video shows a set of observations of lucky images of Jupiter, taken on April 8, 2019.

To create these infrared images, the researchers used a technique called “lucky images.” That’s when a ground-based telescope takes many short-exposure images from the same location, and the researchers select the sharpest images (usually from when Earth’s atmosphere was creating little interference).

Bringing these select images from each Jupiter region together, the group created an unprecedented infrared portrait of the entire planet.

“These images rival the view from space,” added Wong.

A look at Jupiter’s turbulent weather

When Juno surrounds Jupiter, it picks up radio waves from lightning deep in the planet’s atmosphere. The researchers combined the coordinates of those rays with images from the Gemini and Hubble telescopes.

They discovered that the beam forms around 64-kilometer-high cloud towers that rotate and exchange heat in a process called convection, which rises above the water clouds deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

An illustration of lightning, convective towers, clear water clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“Scientists track lightning because it is a marker for convection, the turbulent mixing process that transports Jupiter’s internal heat to visible clouds,” Wong said in a statement. “Ongoing studies of lightning sources will help us understand how convection on Jupiter is different or similar to convection in Earth’s atmosphere.”

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