The American probe Juno has measured the vortex that has for a minimum of three hundred and fifty years the giant planet. It turns out more superficial than we thought.
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Colossal Vortex of more than 16,000 kilometers of diameter, the great red spot of Jupiter intrigues the scientists since its discovery respectively by Robert Hooke, in 1665, and by Jean-Dominique Cassini, the following year. While, on Earth, the life of a hurricane rarely exceeds the dozen days, this titanic storm breaths without discontinuous on the same region of the southern hemisphere since at least three hundred and fifty years.
With a diameter greater than that of the earth, this “anticyclone”, where rotate (in the opposite direction of the clockwise) of the winds at 300 km / h on average, is it confined to the highest Layers of the atmosphere or is it rooted in the depths of giant gaseous star? The Juno mission team of NASA, which held on Thursday, October 28 a press conference, has just answered this question. In four articles published in Science and Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets and Geophysical Research Letters, these researchers explain how they were able to establish, from the data collected by the on-site arrival probe in 2016, that this disturbance is relatively superficial. In any case, it would be less thicker than the famous structures in the form of visible colored bands on the images of Jupiter, the largest of the planets of the solar system.
On Earth, the movements of the atmosphere are mainly governed by the combined effects of the sunlight that heats the oceans and continents, the rotation of the planet and the condensation of the water originally rains. “Jupiter has a mass 318 times, turns on itself in just ten hours and has no solid surface,” says Tristan Guillot, CNRS Research Director at the Observatory of the Côte d’Azur and co-investigator of The Juno mission. Jupiter also has the particularity of being made of 90% hydrogen and helium, that is to say lighter chemical elements than any condensation product … “
Cyclonic and anticyclonic systems
And yet: through the eye of a telescope, similarities appear. Episoductically, in the middle of the succession of the bands, the clouds of ammonia and ammonium hydrosulphide which circulate at the high altitudes, and give to the celestial body its extraordinary hues, organize themselves in the form of cyclonic and anticyclonic systems. Below, powerful thunderstorms, powered by the condensation of the water and accompanied by lightning, are unleashed. Some of these vortex end up disappear. Others, like the big red spot, lie.
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