NASA’s Juno probe has solved the mystery of what drives the swirling storms at Jupiter’s poles.
Space.com reports, a new study finds that the massive vortex storms around Jupiter’s poles are sustained by the same process that leads to the formation of ocean eddies on Earth.
Jupiter’s massive storms, which span up to 1,000km, were first detected by NASA’s Juno probe in 2016. Since then, scientists have speculated these storms are driven by convection – a process known from Earth. However, so far, they have not been able to prove the existence of this process on Jupiter.
Oceanographer Lia Siegelman – a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California (USA) – realized that those storms are quite similar to the ocean eddies that science studies on the planet. our.
“When I see the variety of turbulence around Jupiter’s storms, it reminds me of the turbulence you can see in the ocean around eddies,” said Lia Siegelman.
Siegelman and her colleagues analyzed a series of images of storms around Jupiter’s north pole taken with infrared wavelengths, which show the heat given off by an object. The researchers used the same method that helps scientists study large-scale air and water flows in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.
The analysis allows the science team to calculate the wind’s direction and speed, as well as track the movements of the clouds. They were able to identify areas of thin cloud cover, where they peered deeper into Jupiter’s atmosphere, and areas obscured by dense fog.
The analysis demonstrates that rising hot air transports energy through the atmosphere and “feeds” clouds until they develop into large-scale storms, such as those observed around the world. around the poles.
Just as the science of Earth’s oceans is helping to unravel the mysteries of Jupiter’s atmosphere, these new findings could help shed light on large-scale processes on Earth’s oceans, said Siegelman. The earth.
For example, the physics at work on Jupiter could reveal energy exchange routes that may also exist on Earth that scientists have yet to identify.
Juno was the first spacecraft to photograph Jupiter’s poles, as previous probes explored the giant planet by orbiting the equator. The craft found eight storms around the planet’s north pole and five to the south, all of which are still in existence more than five years after their discovery.
The study was published January 10 in the journal Nature Physics.
