HURRICANES BIGGER THAN EARTH

Easily one of the most famous storms in the Solar System, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is so large that it is visible through many Earthbased telescopes.

The Great Red Spot is thought to have been in existence for at least 340 years. The oval red eye rotates anticlockwise due to the crushing high pressure on the planet. Winds can reach over 400 kilometres per hour (250 miles per hour) around the spot. However, inside the storm they seem to be nearly non-existent. And that’s not all; this complicated weather system has an average temperature of about -162 degrees Celsius (-260 degrees Fahrenheit).

At around eight kilometres (five miles) above the surrounding clouds and held in place by an eastward jet stream to its south and a very strong westward jet flowing into its north, the Great Red Spot has travelled several times around Jupiter, but how did such a behemoth of a storm come to appear on the gas giant’s surface?

The answer is not clear, despite the efforts of planetary scientists. However, experts do theorise that the storm is driven by an internal heat source, and it absorbs smaller storms that fall into its path, passing over and swallowing them whole. Another thing they know is that the Great Red Spot hasn’t always been its current diameter. In 2004, astronomers noticed that the great storm had around half the 40,000-kilometre (25,000-mile) diameter it had around 100 years before. If the Great Red Spot continues to downsize at this rate, it could morph from an oval shape into a more circular storm by 2040. You might think this well-known feature won’t be sticking around for long as it becomes smaller, but experts believe the storm is here to stay since it is strongly powered by numerous other phenomena in the atmosphere.

Storms like these are not out of place on Jupiter, whose atmosphere is a zigzag pattern of 12 jet streams, with blemishes of warmer brown and cooler white ovals in the atmosphere owed to storms as young as a few hours or stretching into centuries.