What is the secret to a long life? For the Great Red Spot, a massive storm that has been churning the surface of Jupiter for at least 150 years, the answer may be cannibalism.
The Great Red Spot (GRS) is about twice as wide as it SoilBut over time, it has gradually shrunk, and the storm is currently half the size it was at the end of the 19th century. So when a series of smaller atmospheric storms collided with the GRS in recent years, causing parts of the larger storm, scientists were concerned that the long-lived and iconic GRS would be torn to pieces.
Instead, the GRS slurped up its smaller cyclone siblings and was no worse for wear and tear. And like the energy drinks that human athletes consume, small storms can give a much-needed boost to the GRS, keeping it running for years to come.
Related: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: a monster storm in the picture
Regular observation of the Great Red Spot began in 1850, but modern astronomers debate who recorded the first recorded sighting of the mighty storm. Some argue that the honor belongs to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who described the storm in 1665, while others maintain that the English scientist Robert Hooke did so a year earlier, according to the American Physical Society (APS).
The storm is located near Jupiter’s equator in the southern hemisphere and is rotating counterclockwise. Just like the hurricanes that shape on Earth, the eye of the storm is relatively still. But winds farther from the center can reach speeds of up to 425 mph (680 km / h), NASA says
No one knows what gives the GRS its distinctive red color, or what caused the massive storm centuries ago. However, it may have lived that long because Jupiter has no solid surface below 70 kilometers of cloud layers. Land formations on Earth slow down and dissipate powerful hurricanes, so the GRS may rage on because there is no land mass to stop it Live Science’s sister site Space.com reported
However, what sparked the storm’s birth and growth may be slowly disappearing. In 1879, the GRS was approximately 24,850 miles (40,000 kilometers) wide; it has since shrunk to about 9,320 miles (15,000 km).
To learn more about Jupiter’s GRS and other mysteries, NASA launched the Juno mission in 2011. With its arrival in Jupiter on July 4, 2016, Juno became a rotating eye in the sky to navigate through the dense clouds of the gas giant. stare and capture it up close. -on images of the GRS and other phenomena, such as a hypnotic vortex cluster at the north pole of Jupiter.
A threat from the east
Between 2018 and 2020, when the GRS was smaller than in 150 years of observations, it was bombarded from the east by dozens of anticyclones – storms with high-pressure centers turning counterclockwise – that ripped large red strips from the site. main part. Small eddies had hit the GRS before, but never so many in such a short span of time, scientists wrote in a new study.
“Its structure and even its survival seemed threatened,” researchers reported March 17 in the US Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
For their study, they investigated the impact of these smaller storms on the GRS. They measured and mapped cloud features in images from the GRS captured by the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam; by the Hubble Space Telescope; by the Calar Alto Observatory in Almería, Spain; and according to the study by amateur astronomers using ground telescopes.
Although the GRS eclipses these anticyclones, no, they were still quite large, about 10 times the size of hurricanes on Earth. As they got closer to the GRS, they peeled strips away from the central part of the storm, creating red “streamers” that extended from the gigantic site. The collisions also disrupted the great storm’s overall shape, says lead author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, a professor of applied physics at Basque Country University in Bilbao, Spain, said in a statement
“All of this significantly disturbed the red oval region of the GRS and was even suspected of compromising its longevity,” the study authors reported.
However, the damage was superficial. The GRS extends to a depth of approximately 125 miles (200 km). Changes in structures and reflectivity in the GRS and the red flakes, and simulations of the collisions showed that the ruptured streamers were only a few miles deep, “without affecting the full depth of the GRS,” the study said. “By October 2019, the visible red oval was almost restored to its previous size.”
What’s more, the speed of the Giant Red Spot’s internal rotation increased after its “recording” of the smaller storms, suggesting that it absorbed their energy, the researchers wrote.
The collision with the anticyclones did not exhaust the GRS’s power or bring it closer to destruction. Rather, it showed that a cannibal diet “can increase the rotational speed of the GRS, and perhaps maintain it in a steady state over a longer period of time,” Sánchez-Lavega said.
Originally published on Live Science.