I love when students ask a question about what they read and yesterday the question was asked: Where did Jupiter's storm come from? Here's what I know: The largest and most powerful hurricanes ever recorded on Earth spanned over 1,000 miles across with winds gusting up to around 200 mph. That’s wide enough to stretch across nearly all U.S. states east of Texas. But even that kind of storm is dwarfed by the Great Red Spot, a gigantic storm in Jupiter. There, gigantic means twice as wide as Earth. With tremendous winds peaking at about 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for the past 150 years—maybe even much longer than that. While people saw a big spot in Jupiter as early as they started stargazing through telescopes in the 1600s, it is still unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot is there and it’s been there for a while, but they still struggle to learn what causes its swirl of reddish hues. Understanding the Great Red Spot is not easy, and it’s mostly Jupiter’s fault. A planet a thousand times as big as Earth, Jupiter consists mostly of gas. A liquid ocean of hydrogen surrounds its core, and the atmosphere consists mostly of hydrogen and helium. That translates into no solid ground like we have on Earth to weaken storms. Studies show that Jupiter’s upper atmosphere has clouds consisting of ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, and water. Still, scientists don’t know exactly how or even whether these chemicals react to give colors like those in the Great Red Spot. Alright, so why is the storm red? The exact cause of the coloring has not been proven, but…lab experiments support the theory that the color is caused by complex organic molecules, red phosphorus, or another sulfur compound that are pulled from deeper within Jupiter. The color of the Great Red Spot varies. At times it is brick-red, fading to a pale salmon, and even white. The spot occasionally disappears from the visible spectrum and can only be seen as the Red Spot Hollow. The periods that the color changes last and occur on an unpredictable schedule. As you can see, the answer to ”why does Jupiter have the Great Red Spot?” has been well researched by NASA and other space agencies. While the answer is not crystal clear at this time, future missions to the planet are designed to better study the atmosphere and somehow help us to understand our own weather patterns. Until we know the answer we can just go ahead and gaze at the storm and think about how amazing it is!
20 Comments
|
Mrs. TaylorI love science! Everything about the world is interesting and never boring. I love to study plants, animals, insects, and people. My favorite subjects are my students who are the most unique organisms on the planet! Categories |