Bengaluru :Astronomers operating the NASA’s Juno spacecraft have made the first direct dimension of the depth of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the notorious storm on the earth that’s three times as wide as the Earth, and has been swirling for centuries. The findings indicate that the storm extends to a depth of roughly 300 kilometres ( imagine 34 Mount Everests placed one on top of each other), with a maximum depth limit of 500 kilometres Juno flew over the storm below the altitude of kilometres, in February and July 2019, enabling the platoon to collect data about the storm The astronomers used two ways to calculate the magnitude and depth of the storm. One was the use of gravitational data as Juno flew over the storm, and the other was fryer data the findings were published in two papers in the journal Science this week.
The red storm
The Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm, which means its winds blow in theanti-clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere. It has been observed continuously since the 1800s, and is red in colour. Its shade varies, going from bright red to pale pink to white and occasionally fading, but the exact medium of the colour variations, driven by solar ultraviolet radiation and its response with feasts, isn’t completely understood Jupiter’s atmosphere is made up of several bands of winds running parallel to the ambit and flowing across the earth in both directions. The smoothly coloured bands are called zones and the dark bones are called belts. The Great Red Spot is located at the edge of the South Equatorial Belt The colour of the storm also contrasts against the winds of this dynamicbelt.However, the storm becomes darker, and vice versa, If the belt is lighter in colour.
The storm is kilometres wide, and is the largest storm or wind miracle in the solar system. It’s a high- pressure region with colder temperatures and high winds Gravitational anomaly The increased viscosity of the storm, compared to the girding layers of atmosphere, creates a localised increased graveness effect. In fact, the earth itself isn’t gravitationally symmetrical across both components, and this is explained by the extremely important winds driving the Great Red Spot This gravitational anomaly causes any spacecraft flying over the storm to witness a mildly advanced haul, which can also be used to calculate the mass of the storm — and therefore its other parcels. The authors of the graveness paper describe the storm as being 300 km deep, with a 100 km periphery both ways They calculated a maximum depth constraint of 500 km.
The fryer radiometer instrument onboard Juno is a group of radiometers that record Jupiter’s electromagnetic flux up to a depth of 600 kilometres. Its readings help understand the temperature at different mound and through layers of winds, as well as the composition of the shadows. It also allows the experimenters to produce heat charts of different layers of the atmosphere and find wind features belonging to the storm This storm is also shallower than the zonal spurts, which extend to depths of over to km. The scientists aren’t sure why the storm doesn’t extend to this depth. There is n’t enough data yet to understand why the storm subsides at a maximum depth of 500 km.
