Posted on 07/29/2024 1:20:09 PM PDT by Red Badger
Jupiter as seen by Hubble.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley)
=================================================================
The Great Red Spot is a storm larger than our whole planet. It is clearly visible on the Southern Hemisphere of Jupiter, even to small telescopes, and we have been observing it for centuries. It became clear in the last few years that it is shrinking. Now, new research suggests that the cause of this is a change in diet.
Simulations suggest that the growth of the larger storm depends on continuously incorporating smaller storms that get too close, adding in this way to the Great Red Spot. But lately, there has been a decline in small storms, and so too the Great Red Spot has declined.
Latitudinally, so north to south, the Spot has not changed much since the late 19th century. However, its longitudinal extent has contracted from about 40 degrees in the late 1800s to 14 degrees in 2016, when NASA's Juno entered orbit around the planet.
VIDEO AT LINK..................
The team used 3D simulations of the planetary atmosphere to work out what might be driving the Great Red Spot. Some of these simulated the Spot with smaller storms of varying frequency and intensity. Others did not have the smaller storms. The simulation revealed that the Spot grows in the presence of smaller storms.
“We found through numerical simulations that by feeding the Great Red Spot a diet of smaller storms, as has been known to occur on Jupiter, we could modulate its size,” lead author Caleb Keaveney, a graduate researcher at Yale, said in a statement.
The base of the research is actually Earth’s weather. While our planet hasn’t got a storm that has survived for hundreds of years, there are larger systems like the heat domes that are influenced in their longevity by smaller weather systems. If it can happen on Earth, it might happen on Jupiter – and maybe vice-versa.
“Our study has compelling implications for weather events on Earth,” Keaveney said. “Interactions with nearby weather systems have been shown to sustain and amplify heat domes, which motivated our hypothesis that similar interactions on Jupiter could sustain the Great Red Spot. In validating that hypothesis, we provide additional support to this understanding of heat domes on Earth.”
The team now plans to refine the simulation to maybe even work out how the Great Red Spot came to be, another enduring mystery of this fascinating weather event.
The study is published in the journal Icarus.
Same thing could happen to Uranus.
That’s a relief! I thought it was going to be blamed on Trump, or “global warming,” or mean tweets, or cow farts.
i saw expanse... it is the protomolecule.
If it kept consuming other storms, wouldn’t there eventually be fewer storms to consume?
They are like Lay’s Potato Chips.
“Eat all you want. We’ll make more.”..................
Theres a brown spot on Uranus that won’t stop growing.
Once that storm hits landfall it will all be over
Stopped drinking Killian’s Red.
Change in diet.
Our freon finally got to Jupiter!
Yep, anthropogenic. Doom awaits if we don’t start eating ze bugs right NOW!
Since we have no observations of Jupiter prior to the 1600s (and even those are spectacularly unreliable), we really know very little about the Great Red Spot. It’s entirely possible that it’s less than a thousand years old, and therefore entirely transient. Jupiter is still an astonishingly dynamic world, so there’s nothing to say that this feature has any kind of permanence.
As another example, the ring structures around Saturn are also transient, albeit on a larger scale. In another hundred-thousand years or so, they’ll be gone.
There are klingons around uranus
Are we hurting Jupiter?
Interplanetary zit cream
Obviously climate change.
Gore-bull worming caused by white males
Climate Change? It’s effecting the Solar System! What does the Solar System have common?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.