Giant Red Spot may be cranking up heat on Jupiter
Located about 500 million miles from the sun, Jupiter should be bitterly cold. But mysteriously, some parts of the planet’s upper atmosphere are hundreds or even thousands of degrees hotter than they should be.
Scientists finally found a possible reason: Wild winds from Jupiter’s famed Giant Red Spot — the biggest storm in the solar system and larger than the Earth — may fuel the unusual heating of the massive planet’s atmosphere.
The study, published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature, concludes the storm produces energy waves that dramatically turn up the heat in the far reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
More than five times more dis- tant from the sun than Earth, Jupiter’s warm upper atmosphere has long puzzled scientists. Temperatures there range from 800 to 1,700 degrees. Above the Red Spot, it’s even hotter — a sizzling 2,500 degrees, said Boston University’s James O’Donoghue, the study’s lead author.
That level of heat is similar to Earth’s upper atmosphere and far hotter than any outer planets. Theoretically, sunlight should only be able to heat Jupiter’s upper atmosphere to a not-so-balmy 100 degrees below zero. Jupiter receives only 3.3% of the light — therefore heating — that Earth does, he said.
Using an infrared telescope in Hawaii, O’Donoghue and other researchers scanned Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
“We could see almost immediately that our maximum temperatures at high altitudes were above the Great Red Spot far below — a weird coincidence or a major clue?” O’Donoghue wondered. It was more than a coincidence, he theorized.
Jupiter’s Red Spot is one of the greatest marvels of our solar system.
Discovered centuries ago, its swirling pattern of colorful gases is often called a “perpetual hurricane.” O’Donoghue said the giant storm could send some combination of gravity and acoustic waves upward.
Similar to how a guitar string moves when plucked, gravity waves are created when air currents collide with objects such as mountains. Sound waves are compressions of the air. A combination of these two wave types “crashing ” like ocean waves on a beach warms the upper atmosphere 500 miles above the storm, the study found.
NASA’s spacecraft Juno, in orbit around Jupiter, should help scientists learn more about the spot and its heating element.