NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been keeping a very keen eye on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot for more than 10 years. It’s a huge roiling storm that can even eat up the whole Earth. The storm has been observed on the surface of the planet for more than 150 years – and it’s still as mysterious as ever.
Now, the space telescope has found that the average wind speeds of the Red Spot are increasing at a steady pace. Between 2009 and 2020, wind speeds along the boundaries of the storm increased by 8%, as per NASA, with the winds at the perimeter reaching speeds in excess of 400 mph.
Mysteries of Great Red Spot
“Since we don’t have a storm chaser plane at Jupiter, we can’t continuously measure the winds on-site,” said Amy Simon, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Hubble is the only telescope that has the kind of temporal coverage and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter’s winds in this detail.”
The resolution is very detailed, enabling researchers to measure differences in wind speeds of less than 1.6 mph. “We’re talking about such a small change that if you didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data, we wouldn’t know it happened,” Simon said. “With Hubble we have the precision we need to spot a trend.”
Still many things are unknown
Despite having detailed records, there are still a lot of things yet to be known about the Great Red Spot. Figuring out what made the speed of the wind increase is difficult to tell “since Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well,” Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research, said in the statement. “Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data.”
“But it’s an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what’s fueling the Great Red Spot and how it’s maintaining energy,” Wong added.
Previously, Astronomers observing Jupiter were left surprised when a large unknown object appeared to have hit the planet. At the time, many astronomers were observing an ongoing transit of the shadow of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons.
