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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a ‘furnace’ for the planet, study finds

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Despite orbiting five times the distance from the Sun as Earth, the temperatures in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere are quite comparable to our planet’s.

According to a new study in the journal Nature, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot acts as a furnace, pumping heat into the upper atmosphere.

“With solar heating from above ruled out, we designed observations to map the heat distribution over the entire planet in search for any temperature anomalies that might yield clues as to where the energy is coming from,” study author James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at Boston University, told redOrbit in a news release.

Connecting Heating to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Astronomers evaluate the temperature of a planet by measuring the non-visible, infrared light it gives off. The visible cloud tops we see at Jupiter are approximately 30 miles above its surface; the infrared light in the study from heights around 500 miles higher. When the study team looked at their outcomes, they saw high altitude temperatures much greater than expected whenever their telescope focused on locations in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

“We could see almost immediately that our maximum temperatures at high altitudes were above the Great Red Spot far below–a weird coincidence or a major clue?” O’Donoghue said.

Spanning three Earth-diameters, the GRS has winds that take six days to complete a single rotation. The planet completes one revolution in ten hours, considered a quick pace.

“The Great Red Spot is a terrific source of energy to heat the upper atmosphere at Jupiter, but we had no prior evidence of its actual effects upon observed temperatures at high altitudes,” said study author Luke Moore, a planetary scientist at BU.

The study team noted that the abnormally high-temperature ranges associated with the GRS aren’t exclusive to Jupiter. The situation also occurs at Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and most likely for massive exoplanets outside our solar system.

“Energy transfer to the upper atmosphere from below has been simulated for planetary atmospheres, but not yet backed up by observations,” O’Donoghue said. “The extremely high temperatures observed above the storm appear to be the ‘smoking gun’ of this energy transfer, indicating that planet-wide heating is a plausible explanation for the ‘energy crisis.’ ”

—–

Image credit: Art by Karen Teramura, UH IfA with James O’Donoghue and Luke Moore

The post Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a ‘furnace’ for the planet, study finds appeared first on Redorbit.

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offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and reference information. For the latest science news, space news, technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn something new every day.”


Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113415207/jupiter-red-spot-072716/


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