Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is over 200 miles deep
On Jupiter, a storm’s been brewing for more than 300 years. Known as the Great Red Spot (GRS), this swirling high-pressure region is clearly visible from space, spanning a region in Jupiter’s atmosphere more than 10,000 miles wide – about one-and-a-quarter times the diameter of Earth. But there’s even more to the churning tempest than meets the eye. Recent research has revealed that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is also extraordinarily deep, extending as many as 300 miles into the planet’s atmosphere, or about 40 times as deep as the Mariana Trench on Earth.
That’s far deeper than researchers expected, with the bottom of the storm extending well below the atmospheric level where water and ammonia are expected to condense into clouds. The storm’s deep roots suggest that some as-yet unknown processes link Jupiter’s interior and deep atmosphere, driving intense meteorological events over much larger scales than previously thought. “We’re getting our first real understanding of how Jupiter’s beautiful and violent atmosphere works,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA’S Juno mission.
NASA’S Juno probe entered
Jupiter’s orbit in 2016 and has since completed 36 passes of the nearly 87,000-milewide gas giant. Researchers examining the Great Red Spot used the probe’s microwave radiometer, a tool that detects microwaves emitted from inside the planet. Unlike the radio and infrared radiation emitted by the gas giant, microwaves can make it all the way through the planet’s thick cloud layer.
By studying the microwave emissions that made it through the Great Red Spot, the researchers have determined that the storm extends more than 200 miles deep. It has also been discovered that the spot may be even bigger than that. The Great Red Spot was examined using Juno’s gravity-detection tools. Using the data from 12 flights that passed by the spot, researchers have calculated where the storm was concentrating the most atmospheric mass over the planet, allowing them to estimate its depth. Researchers have determined that the spot reaches a maximum depth of about 300 miles below the cloud tops.
As deep as this seems, the Great Red Spot is still much shallower than the enormous jets of wind that surround and power it; those bands of wind extend to depths of about 2,000 miles below the cloud tops.