Jupiter’s atmosphere is fascinatingly complex and stunningly beautiful. This close-up from the Juno spacecraft shows a region called STB Spectre, located in Jupiter’s South Temperate Belt. The bluish area to the right is a long-lived storm that’s bordering on very different atmospheric conditions to the left. Shear from these storms moving past one another creates many of the curling waves we see in the image. These are examples of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which generates ocean waves here on Earth, creates spectacular clouds in our atmosphere, and is even responsible for waves in galaxy clusters. Check out some of the other amazing images Juno has sent back of our solar system’s largest planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/R. Tkachenko; via Gizmodo)
Tag: Jupiter
Jupiter On Display
The rich detail of Jupiter’s atmosphere is on full display in this enhanced-color image from the Juno spacecraft. (Full resolution version here – trust me, you want to click that link.) To the north, on the left side of the image, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot swirls. To the center and right, the cloud bands of Jupiter’s southern region are coming into view. The color enhancements really highlight eddies on the edge of these bands. These are examples of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities caused by shear between cloud bands moving at different speeds. Within the bands, smaller vortices spin. Some of these are anti-cyclones, high-pressure storm systems found all over the planet. Jupiter’s atmosphere still holds many mysteries for scientists, but I love how every gorgeous image Juno sends back shows fluid physics written larger than life across our solar system’s biggest planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/G. Eichstädt /S. Doran; via Gizmodo)
Perijove
The Juno spacecraft continues to send back incredible photos of Jupiter’s atmosphere. This video animates images from the sixth close pass of Jupiter to give you a sense of what Juno sees as it swoops by our system’s largest planet. The trajectory passes from the north pole to the south, showing Jupiter’s whitish zones, dark belts, and massive storms. Up close Jupiter looks like an Impressionist painting, all vortices and shear instabilities. The large white spots you see are enormous counterclockwise rotating vortices known as anticyclones – many of them larger than our entire planet. (Video credit: NASA / SwRI / MSSS / G. Eichstädt / S. Doran)
Jupiter’s Little Red Spot
The Juno mission has been revealing angles of Jupiter we’ve never seen before. This photo shows Jupiter’s northern temperate latitudes and NN-LRS-1, a.k.a. the Little Red Spot (lower left), the third largest anticyclone on Jupiter. The Little Red Spot is a storm roughly the size of the Earth and was first observed in 1993. As an anticyclone, it has large-scale rotation around a core of high pressure and rotates in a clockwise direction since it is in the northern hemisphere. Jupiter’s anticyclones seem to be powered by merging with other storms; in 1998, the Little Red Spot merged with three other storms that had existed for decades. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers; via Bad Astronomy)
Jovian Poles
NASA’s Juno mission has been revealing a side of Jupiter we’ve never seen before. We all recognize the familiar stripes of the planet’s cloud bands, but its poles are entirely different. Unlike Saturn with its hexagonal polar vortex, Jupiter’s poles are a swirling tapestry of turbulent vortices – full of features that citizen scientists are helping to reveal. All of the images in this post were created by citizen scientists helping to process raw images from Juno, and you can contribute, too! The Juno mission solicits input from the public on where and what should be imaged, in addition to providing raw images individuals can process and repost. Check it out at the JunoCam website and become part of the science! (Image credits: All images – NASA/SwRI/MSSS + R. Tkachenko, Orion76; A. Mai)
Jovian Poles
We’re used to viewing Jupiter from its equator, where bands of light and dark clouds dominate the picture. From its poles, Jupiter looks very different, as these recent images from Juno show. Jupiter’s north pole is shown on the left and its south pole on the right. Both are awash in vortices. There’s another great black-and-white image of the south pole here, where the vortices really stand out. Jupiter’s atmosphere contains both cyclones, which rotate counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere, and anticyclones, which behave in the reverse. Unlike in Earth’s atmosphere, anticyclones dominate on Jupiter, especially among storms more than 2000 km across. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Juno Mission; via APOD)
P.S. – Tomorrow night is the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and I’ll be giving one of their 24/7 lectures. If you’d like to tune in and hear me describe fluid dynamics in 24 seconds + 7 words, there will be a webcast here.
Where Jupiter’s Heat Comes From
Exactly what goes on in Jupiter’s atmosphere has confounded scientists for decades. Its upper atmosphere – essentially the only part we can observe – is hundreds of degrees warmer than solar heating can account for. Although it has bright auroras at its poles, that energy is trapped at high altitudes by the same rotational effects that create Jupiter’s stunning bands.
Observations of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm that’s lasted for hundreds of years, may provide clues as to where all the extra heat is coming from. Spectral mapping shows that the area over the Spot is over 1000K warmer than the rest of the upper atmosphere. Because of its isolated location, the best explanation for the Great Red Spot’s extra heat comes from below: scientists suspect that the raging storm is generating so much turbulence and such a deafening roar that these gravity and acoustic waves propagate upward and heat the atmosphere above. If so, a similar coupling mechanism to the clouds below may account for the widespread warmth in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. (Image credit: NASA; research credit: J. O’Donoghue et al.)
Arriving at Jupiter
Today all eyes turn to Jupiter where NASA’s Juno spacecraft will enter orbit around the gas giant. In preparation, Hubble and ground-based telescopes have been observing Jupiter in both the visible (upper right) and infrared (upper left) spectrum. The lower image shows a 1:5 scale model of Juno and a full-size replica of one of its solar panels; note the mannequin in the lower right corner for scale.
Juno is entering one of the harshest environments in the solar system with intense magnetic fields that trap lethal amounts of radiation around the planet. The lovely blue auroras Hubble sees around Jupiter’s poles are a never-ending hailstorm of solar wind particles hitting Jupiter’s atmosphere. Juno will be studying the structure of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, gravitational field, and its interior, hopefully helping scientists explain how the planet formed and the role it played in the formation of our solar system. (Image credits: infrared Jupiter – ESO/L. Fletcher; Jovian auroras – Hubble/ESA; Juno model and solar panel – N. Sharp)
Jovian Belts and Zones
Jupiter’s colorful cloud bands alternate between dark belts and light zones. The bands mark convection cells in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and, like on Earth, powerful jet streams form due to this atmospheric heating and the planet’s rotation. The jet winds can even move in opposite directions, creating strong shear forces between neighboring cloud bands. The shear helps drive Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in the clouds, resulting in the regularly spaced waves and vortices seen along the edges of some bands. (Image credit: NASA/ESA; via APOD)
Io’s Magma Ocean
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in our solar system. The energy that drives its geological activity comes from tidal forces the moon experiences from Jupiter and from other Jovian moons. These forces flex the moon and heat its interior via friction. Previous models of Io’s tidal heating assumed a solid body, but their results predicted volcanoes in locations that did not match observations of the moon. A new study suggests that the missing piece of the puzzle is a subsurface ocean of magma. Highly viscous liquids like magma also generate heat when deformed by tidal forces, and applying this model to Io allowed scientists to better match the volcano distribution actually seen on the world. For more, check out NASA’s article. (Image credit: NASA; via Gizmodo; submitted by jshoer)
