Red in Jupiter’s Spot Not What Astronomers Thought
The best thermal images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot yet captured have revealed surprising weather and temperature variation within the solar system’s most famous storm.
The darkest red part of the spot turns out to be a warm patch inside the otherwise cold storm. The temperature variation is slight: “Warm” in this case translates to -250 degrees Fahrenheit while cold is an even frostier -256 degrees F. But even that difference is enough to create intriguing internal dynamics.
PIA 03000: False-color picture of Jupiter's northern hemisphere between 10 and 50 degrees latitude. The high and thin clouds are represented by light blue, deep clouds are reddish, and high and thick clouds are white. A high haze overlying a clear, deep atmosphere is represented by dark purple. This image was taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on April 3, 1997 at a distance of 1.4 million kilometers (.86 million miles).
Anomaly: Vertical rectilinear streaks more definite on the left hand side of the magnified spot, and horizontal streaks most noticeable to the lower middle right.