Author: Mary Beth Griggs / Source: Good News Network
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Plus: new insights into the planet’s interior.
The East Coast of the United States is reeling from successive punches of massive nor’easters. But to find some truly epic back-to-back storms, you’re going to have to head more than 365 million miles away to visit Jupiter.
And no, this has nothing to do with the sadly vanishing Great Red Spot. In a paper published today in Nature, researchers described some fascinating storms recently discovered by the Juno spacecraft, which started exploring Jupiter in 2016.
That picture at the top of this article isn’t pepperoni pizza or some volcanic vortex. It shows five massive cyclones arranged neatly around a center cyclone at Jupiter’s south pole. Near the north pole, eight cyclones are similarly arranged around a central whirling vortex.
“Prior to Juno we did not know what the weather was like near Jupiter’s poles. Now, we have been able to observe the polar weather up-close every two months,” lead study author Alberto Adriani said in a statement. “Each one of the northern cyclones is almost as wide as the distance between Naples, Italy, and New York City—and the southern ones are even larger than that.
They have very violent winds, reaching, in some cases, speeds as great as 220 mph. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, they are very close together and enduring. There is nothing else like it that we know of in the solar system.”The fact that the cyclones are arranged in polygonal shapes—an octagon and a pentagon—isn’t necessarily surprising in and of itself. Polygonal features have shown up on other gas giants, like the hexagonal jet…
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