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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided fresh insights into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS), revealing that the massive storm is fluctuating in size and shape, unlike previous assumptions about its stability.
Observations collected between December 2023 and March 2024 show the GRS jiggling, with its elliptical shape oscillating like a “bowl of gelatin,” a phenomenon that has not been identified before.
The data gathered from Hubble images over 90 days allowed astronomers to create a time-lapse movie of the GRS, highlighting the storm’s dynamic behaviour, including its changing size, speed, and movement.
Amy Simon, lead author from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, noted that the oscillations in the GRS’s size and speed were unexpected. The team found no hydrodynamic explanation yet for this behaviour.
Credit : NASA
The research team used high-resolution Hubble images to study the storm’s size, shape, color, and brightness. One of the observations showed that the GRS’s core brightens in ultraviolet light when the storm reaches its maximum size during the oscillation cycle.
Co-investigator Mike Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, compared the GRS’s interaction with Jupiter’s jet streams to a sandwich, with the storm pushing against the strong winds to its north and south, causing its fluctuating shape.
Researchers believe the GRS will continue to shrink before stabilizing into a less elongated shape. Once it shrinks within its latitude band, the storm’s interaction with Jupiter’s wind field will hold it more firmly in place.
The cause of the GRS’s oscillation remains unknown. Future observations from Hubble and other telescopes may uncover the underlying factors contributing to this unusual phenomenon. These results were presented at the American Astronomical Society’s 56th annual meeting.