What is the secret of a long life? For the Great Red Spot, a tremendous storm that has lingered on Jupiter’s surface for at least 150 years, the answer may be cannibalism.
The Great Red Spot (GRS) is about twice as wide as Earth. But over time, it gradually shrank and the storm is currently half the size it was at the end of the 19th century. When a string of smaller atmospheric storms collided with the GRS in recent years, causing pieces of the larger storm to ‘flake off’, scientists feared the long-lived and iconic GRS could be torn to pieces.
Instead, the GRS swallowed up its smaller cyclone siblings and was no worse. And just like the energy drinks consumed by athletes, small storms can give the GRS a much-needed boost, ensuring it spins for years to come.
Related: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: A Monster Storm in Photos
Regular observation of the Great Red Spot began in 1850, but modern astronomers argue about who recorded the first observed observation of the mighty storm. Some claim the honor belongs to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who described the storm in 1665, while others insist that the English scientist Robert Hooke had done it one year earlier, according to the American Physical Society (APS).
The storm lies near Jupiter’s equator in the southern hemisphere, and it turns left. Much like the hurricane forming on Earth, the eye of the storm is relatively quiet. But winds that are further from the center can reach speeds of up to 680 km / h. NASA says.
No one knows what gives the GRS its distinctive red color or what the enormous storm produced centuries ago. However, it may have lived that long because Jupiter has a solid surface below 70 kilometers of cloud cover. Earth formations slow down and disperse powerful hurricanes, so the GRS continues to rage because there is no land mass below to stop it, Live Science’s sister site Space.com reports.
But whatever fueled the birth and growth of the storm could slowly disappear. In 1879, the GRS measured about 40,000 kilometers wide; since then it has shrunk to about 15,000 kilometers.
To learn more about the GRS and other Jupiter mysteries, NASA launched the Juno mission in 2011. Upon his arrival on July 4, 2016 at Jupiter, Juno became a rolling eye in the sky to peek through the dense cloud cover of the gas giant and catch close. -on images of the GRS and other phenomena, such as a mesmerizing whirlwind group at Jupiter’s north pole.
A threat from the east
Between 2018 and 2020, when the GRS was smaller than it had been in 150 years of observations, it was bombarded from the east by dozens of anticyclones – storms with high pressure centers and turning left – that shook large red parts of the place main body. Small vertebrae have struck in the GRS before, but never so much in such a short period of time, scientists wrote in a new study.
“Its structure and even its existence appear to be threatened,” researchers reported on March 17. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
For their study, they investigated the impact of these smaller storms on the GRS. They measured and mapped cloud properties into images of the GRS, captured by the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam; by the Hubble Space Telescope; by the Calar Alto Observatory in Almería, Spain; and according to amateur astronomers using ground telescopes, according to the study.
Although the GRS dwarfs these anticyclones, it was still quite large and measured about ten times the size of hurricanes on earth. As they get closer to the GRS, they pull strips off the central part of the storm, creating red “streamers” that extend from the giant spot. The collisions also distorted the general shape of the great storm, said lead study author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, a professor of applied physics at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. said in a statement.
“All of this has significantly disrupted the red oval area of the GRS, and it is even suspected of endangering its longevity,” the study’s authors reported.
However, the damage was superficial. The GRS extends to a depth of about 200 kilometers. Changes in structures and reflections in the GRS and the flakes of red, and simulations of the collisions revealed that the torn streams were only a few kilometers deep and that it did not affect the full depth of the GRS, according to the study. “By October 2019, the visible red oval had almost recovered to its previous size.”
What’s more, the speed of the Giant Red Spot’s internal rotation has increased after the “intake” of the smaller storms, indicating that it absorbs their energy, the researchers wrote.
Collision with the anticyclones did not drain the power of the GRS or push it closer to destruction. On the contrary, it has been shown that a rabbit diet can “increase the GRS rotation speed, and perhaps maintain it in a steady state over a longer period of time,” Sánchez-Lavega said.
Originally published on Live Science.