For more than 150 years, when humans have looked at Jupiter, they’ve seen a raging vortex larger than the Earth itself swirling with layers of wind and gas.
The Great Red Spot is a high-pressure storm that has been brewing on Jupiter for hundreds of years, and a team of scientists recently discovered that not only does the storm live on, but its winds are also actually picking up speed.
The recent findings were detailed in a study published in the Geophysical Research Letters.
What’s new — After analyzing 11 years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were shocked to discover that the speed of the wind at the outer boundaries of the storm increased by about 8 percent between the years 2009 and 2020.
The wind speeds in the storm’s outer boundary, known as the high-speed ring, exceed 640 kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, the winds from the innermost regions of the storm were moving more slowly. The winds in the two regions move counterclockwise.
“When I initially saw the results, I asked, ‘Does this make sense?’ No one has ever seen this before,” Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
In this image, the outer boundaries of the storm are marked by the outer green circle with wind speeds exceeding 640 kilometers per hour.NASA, ESA, Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley)
The change in wind speed is less than 2.5 kilometers per hour during one Earth year.
“We’re talking about such a small change that if we didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data, we wouldn’t know it had happened,” Amy Simon, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
Here’s the background — Although the change is small, it is still significant. Despite years of observation, this 400 mile-per-hour anticyclone storm remains largely a mystery to scientists. A lot is still unknown about what fuels the storm, how it maintains its momentum, and the physics that govern it.
In 2017, observations by NASA’s Juno spacecraft found that the root of the Great Red Spot extends 50 to 100 times deeper than the deepest ocean on Earth.
The Great Red Spot has also crushed several rumors of its demise:
In the late 1880s, the Great Red Spot measured as wide as 35,000 miles, or around four times the diameter of Earth. By the time the Voyager spacecraft made it to the planet Jupiter a century later, the storm appeared to be about twice the width of Earth. This led scientists to debate whether the Great Red Spot was shrinking in size.
In May 2019, an amateur astronomer spotted something unusual about the Great Red Spot. A blade-like shape seemed to be flaking off from the vortex, which led some to believe that it would soon disintegrate into oblivion. But later observations showed that the Great Red Spot still had centuries more to go.
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This latest bit of information about the storm’s wind speeds is another intriguing feature of the Great Red Spot.
“It’s an interesting piece of the puzzle that can help us understand what’s fueling the Great Red Spot and how it’s maintaining its energy,” Wong said.
What’s next — NASA’s Juno probe continues to study the giant planet and map its interior structure while taking stunning photos of the world as well. It can provide us perhaps the best vistas of the storm when aligned just right. Monitoring will also continue by the Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
Two upcoming missions — ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and NASA’s Europa Clipper — will orbit Jupiter while getting unprecedented views of Jupiter’s intriguing moons. It may, in the process, get more than a few good glimpses of the great red spot.
Abstract — We measured the horizontal winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS) using data from the WFC3/UVIS instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The data cover 11 epochs from 2009 to 2020. Long-term monotonic trends in size and shape previously noted from the visible cloud appearance are paralleled by changes in the high-speed ring around the vortex. The circularization of the GRS cannot be explained by changes in the horizontal wind shear of the surrounding environment. The velocity fields suggest no long-term trend in the static stability inside or outside the vortex. Instead, the changes are accompanied by a 4%–8% increase in the mean wind speeds of the high-speed ring from 2009 to 2020. Changes in the wind field coincided with the South Equatorial Belt Outbreak storms of 2016– 2017, but not with 2019 “flaking” events involving detachment of red material from the main oval.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
