The discovery of strange and unexpected structures floating above Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Jupiter’s atmosphere is a fascinating, ever-changing environment. Clusters of different colors, storms, massive clouds, and more can be seen all over the planet. However, the upper atmosphere has always been considered calm. Surely this was where the aurora borealis occurred, but beyond that, he thought there wasn’t anything strange going on. Now, a group of astronomers has turned that belief on its head.

The upper atmosphere is difficult to study. At the poles, particles of the volcanic moon Io follow magnetic field lines to create auroras at multiple wavelengths. As for the rest of the planet, the energy that forms it is sunlight. Jupiter receives only about 4% of the sunlight that Earth receives. That’s why astronomers assumed it would be very uniform.

“We thought this area, perhaps naively, would be really boring,” team leader Henrik Melin from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom said in a report published by the American “Science Alert” website. statement“It’s actually as interesting as the Northern Lights, if not more so. Jupiter never ceases to amaze.”

Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed complex structures above the famous Great Red Spot, a storm larger than Earth. They found dark arcs and bright spots visible in infrared light. The source of these variations is not sunlight, but the chaotic deep layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“One way to change this structure is through gravity waves – which are like waves hitting the beach, creating ripples in the sand,” Melin explained. “These waves are generated deep in the turbulent lower atmosphere, around the Great Red Spot, and can travel to high altitudes, changing the structure and emissions of the upper atmosphere.”

These gravitational waves also exist on Earth, but if the mechanism is the same, they are much weaker.

The discovery had been long anticipated. The observations were part of JWST’s Early Science Investigations (ERS) program, where astronomers had been curious about Jupiter’s upper atmosphere for some time.

“This ERS proposal was written in 2017,” said team member Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley. “One of our goals was to investigate why the Great Red Spot is so hot, as revealed by recent observations by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility. However, our new data show completely different results.”

The team hopes to follow up with the James Webb Space Telescope to better understand this part of the Jovian atmosphere. It will also aid in planned observations by the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission, which will explore the planet and its three icy moons.

These results were published in Natural astronomy.