Current Issue



Details of the latest issue of Astronomy Now are available here. Don't miss out, subscribe for just £33 per year.




NewsAlert



Sign up for our NewsAlert service and have the latest space news e-mailed direct to your desktop.

Enter your e-mail address:

Privacy note: your e-mail address will not be used for any other purpose.


Weather Gallery


Back to Weather Gallery homepage



Weather Gallery:

Jupiter

This infrared image shows two bright plume eruptions obtained by the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility on April 5, 2007. Jupiter's internal heat plays a significant role in generating atmospheric disturbances. These bright plumes were storm systems triggered in Jupiter's deep water clouds that forced their way upward in the atmosphere and injected a fresh mixture of ammonia ice and water about 30 kilometres above the visible clouds. The storms were transported in a jet stream in Jupiter's atmosphere at 600 kilometres per hour. Image: NASA/JPL/IRTF.

The New Horizons spacecraft captured several pictures of mesoscale gravity waves in Jupiter's equatorial atmosphere. Buoyancy waves of this type are seen frequently on Earth - for example, they can be caused when air flows over a mountain and a regular cloud pattern forms downstream. In Jupiter's case there are no mountains, but if conditions in the atmosphere are just right, it is possible to form long trains of these small waves. The source of the wave excitation seems to lie deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, below the visible cloud layers at depths corresponding to pressures 10 times that at Earth's surface. The New Horizons measurements showed that the waves move about 100 metres per second faster than surrounding clouds; this is about 25 percent of the speed of sound on Earth and is much greater than current models of these waves predict. Scientists can "read" the speed and patterns of these waves to learn more about activity and stability in the atmospheric layers below. Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

The first colour movie of Jupiter from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows what it would look like to peel the entire globe of Jupiter, stretch it out on a wall into the form of a rectangular map, and watch its atmosphere evolve with time. The Great Red Spot rotates counter-clockwise while horizontal bands adjacent to each other flow in alternate directions and at different speeds. Small, very bright features appear quickly and randomly in turbulent regions, candidates for lightning storms. The movie clip spans 24 Jupiter rotations between Oct. 31 and Nov. 9, 2000. The smallest visible feature at the equator is about 600 kilometres across.  Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Jupiter's swirling Great Red Spot (GRS) has been a permanent fixture in modern telescope observations. But in 2006 another spot appeared, seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms that subsequently merged and then developed a red colour (nicknamed Red Spot junior). Then a third red spot appeared, again produced from a smaller whitish storm, in the same cloud band as the GRS. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on 9 and 10 May 2008, with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. In July, Red Spot Junior grazed past the GRS unscathed, while the youngest spot was pulled into the anticyclonic spin of the GRS before being spat out the other side. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown. Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator. Image: NASA/ESA/M. Wong/I. de Pater (UC Berkeley) et al.

  

   « Previous                             Next »