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May 12, 2020 07:00 am

Scientists Get Their Best-Ever Look At Jupiter's Atmosphere and Storms

Scientists have gotten their most detailed view of the wild storms that swirl through the gas giant's atmosphere. Space.com reports: Every 53 days, Juno skims over Jupiter's cloud tops in a close approach called a perijove, gathering data all the while. Among the spacecraft's instruments is a microwave radiometer, which is tuned to identify lightning strikes and study what ammonia and water vapor are doing in the gas giant's atmosphere. The scientists behind the new research arranged to target Hubble and Gemini to study Jupiter in coordination with Juno's schedule. So while Juno studies a swath of the gas giant as it passes overhead, Hubble and Gemini study the bigger picture of atmospheric activity on Jupiter. Juno has made 26 flybys of the gas giant to date, which means the trio of observatories have built up quite a data set about Jupiter's atmosphere, and scientists have only released the most preliminary findings to date. But those findings already suggested that lightning was most common in a feature that scientists call a filamentary cyclone. "These cyclonic vortices could be internal energy smokestacks, helping release internal energy through convection," Michael Wong, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new research, said in the NASA statement. That convection pulls layers of Jupiter's atmosphere up and down depending on factors like temperature and humidity. Earth's atmosphere does this as well, but not in exactly the same way. In the meantime, the researchers behind the observatory collaboration have already answered one longstanding question about Jupiter's atmosphere, specifically the Great Red Spot storm that has roiled for centuries. Astronomers had long wondered whether transient seemingly dark spots in the storm are caused by a different compound in the atmosphere or by gaps in the cloud cover. And combining the data gathered in close succession by Hubble and Gemini allowed scientists to answer that question: because the dark spots shine brightly in infrared, as deep water clouds do, they seem to represent gaps in upper clouds. "The scientists are also using the data set to analyze zonal winds, atmospheric waves, convective storms, cyclonic vortices and polar atmospheric phenomena like hazes -- and, of course, they anticipate that plenty of other scientific puzzles will benefit from the observations as well," the report adds.

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