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Space Science

Jupiter's Third Red Spot 86

Posted by kdawson from the measels-maybe dept.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the solar system's largest (and longest-lived) storm, was joined by another in 2006, dubbed Red Spot Junior. Now a third red spot near the first two has been photographed by the Hubble space telescope. This is a storm about half the size of Earth. Here's a photo of the new storm (it's the one on the left). From New Scientist: "No one knows for sure what gives the three spots their red color. But one theory is that especially violent storms dredge up material from deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere, such as phosphorus-containing molecules, which undergo chemical reactions that turn them red when exposed to sunlight."
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Jupiter's Third Red Spot More

Jupiter's Third Red Spot

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  • For shame.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by smaerd ( 954708 ) on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:50PM (#23519286)
    Jupiter really has to start wearing protection when it goes all retrograde with Venus.

  • Laser Spectroscopy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jeiler ( 1106393 ) <go.bugger.off@noSPaM.gmail.com> on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:51PM (#23519304) Journal
    With a powerful enough laser (more powerful than we currently have, IIRC), it might be possible to lase the area of the Red Spot and perform absorption spectroscopy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hojima ( 1228978 )
      Light alone can give us a good idea of what the material may be. But if we really wanted to make sure, we'd be better off (both cost and result wise) sending probes to analyze the chemical composition (though I doubt it's any complex organic molecule, so it's not really worth studying).
      • The problem with that is that the chromophores (color-causing agents) are probably extremely minor constituents. It takes very little tinting agent to turn a white cloud interesting colors. Doing an in situ measurement of them would be tricky.
    • How would you do that, exactly? Where does the laser go to and from?

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Mr Z ( 6791 )
        From on top of the shark, past the good guy, and right through the world domination device (accidentally), of course!
      • How would you do that, exactly? Where does the laser go to and from?

        The laser would probably be manufactured in the US, and sent into space.

        But seriously, the laser would be aimed at Jupiter, and the reflection would be analyzed. It's done all the time. In fact, there's one due to land on Mars [marstoday.com] any day now.
        • From where, though? It'd be hard to power such a large laser on a spacecraft and getting a beam to and from the Earth may be harder still.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jeiler ( 1106393 )

        Fundamentally, one would project a frequency-tunable laser beam onto the Red Spot and read the "reflected" results. The different substances in the target absorb light at very specific frequencies: if a sufficiently powerful laser is used to illuminate the Red Spot (and sufficiently sensitive sensors to read the reflected results), it would be relatively simple to analyze the data and determine the composition of the cloud.

        The big problem is that Jupiter is a long way away--at least 17 light-minutes, IIRC

        • Jupiter's one-way light time is more like 35-50 minutes, actually. Painful. As for interference, the radio emission shouldn't interfere with the visible/IR spectrascopy. The thermal emission might, but I doubt it. It's pretty easy to characterize that.

          Along with a sensor, you'll want a very, very high resolution telescope in order to resolve the spot from the background (assuming the spot has spread to the size of the planet... eep). Also, you probably don't want to be on the ground if you're doing IR s
    • Hello Jelier,
      I see that you have some expertice in Laser Spectroscopy. I have been concerned about Chemtrails for some time and thought that perhaps your technique could be used to detect the concentrations and presense of various substances being dumped into our atmosphere by the military in their admitted "weather manipulation experiments". Barrium Salts and Aluminum Oxides are reported to be in these but others suspect other payloads as well. I am running for U.S. Congress District #1 of Wisconsin. A

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jeiler ( 1106393 )

        I have been concerned about Chemtrails for some time....

        Chemtrails are a dead subject, foisted upon the well-meaning and concerned by the dishonest and delusional. I take it as given that you fall into the first two categories, but you're following a topic composed almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and sheer duplicity of a few. Even were you not running for office, I implore you to investigate the science--actual science, not the blatherings of the conspiracy theories.

        However, this thread is neither

  • Three eyed monster (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:53PM (#23519324)
    It will be interesting to see if any two of them ever mix and join together. That would be a spectacle worth watching.

    What would be really, really cool is if we ever send a probe that could figure out the core of these massive gas giants. Solid iron? Molten nickel? Some weird mix of whoknowswhat?

  • The article explicitly says: "The new spot's size has not been announced. The Great Red Spot is roughly as wide as the entire Earth." And from the photo, the new one definitely isn't half the size of the Great Red Spot.
    • That photo may be distorted somewhat.

  • earthly parallels to the Spot? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quadraginta ( 902985 ) on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:54PM (#23519336)
    It's true that there's not much on Jupiter besides atmosphere, but it's still weird to see what amounts to just a huge cyclone lasting for centuries -- or more -- I suppose we don't have any good idea when the Gred Red Spot first appeared.

    Presumably Earth's atmosphere is just too thin to support weather systems of that longevity, although it's hard to think of a good scaling argument for why the size, thickness, mass et cetera of the atmosphere should dictate the scale of the duration of events in it.

    But I wonder if there are parallels in ocean events, here? We have the El Nino/Nina business, the Atlantic Oscillation, and these things at least have periods near decades. Perhaps some of what we consider "permanent" features of the oceans, like the Gulf Stream, are merely "storms" like Jupiter's Red Spot that last several centuries.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by azzuth ( 1177007 )
      That is an interesting idea. I wonder if there is not some process on jupiter that is altering the makeup of the atmosphere. TFA mentions climate change (and this time not our fault) as a possible reason. If there were something organic (bacteria etc) that was producing different gasses could that lead to Jupiter climate change? Aside from that, i would imagine that some factor would have to be changing to trigger a climate change.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Mr Z ( 6791 )
        My understanding is that solar activity is increasing, which is warming up all the planets. The fact that that's happening concurrently with our rising CO2 levels is just wonderful.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 )
        They will find a way to make it our fault. As with any other problem in the universe.
    • > it's hard to think of a good scaling argument for why the size, thickness, mass et cetera of the atmosphere should dictate the scale of the duration of events in it.

      Eh? From properties like size, thickness (viscosity?), mass and a few others like planetary rotation velocity it's trivial to construct lots of independent quantities with the dimension of time. So it's obvious that the duration of storms could depend on such factors.

      • Let me rephrase, then. It's hard to find a correct scaling argument that says the duration of weather events should scale with the size of an atmosphere.

        Coming up with wrong but logically consistent arguments for a given conclusion is easy. That's what numerology and astrology are all about.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Relic of the Future ( 118669 )
      Actually, wo do have some idea of when it first appeared. It formed somewhere between 178 and 343 years [wikipedia.org] ago. (Really, a few relevant wikipedia pages should be required pre-posting reading for every /. science article.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Quadraginta ( 902985 )
        Um...did you actually read the article to which you point? As opposed to skim? If so, you'll notice that the first recorded observations of the Great Red Spot are, by a strange coincidence, around the time of the invention of the telescope. What does that tell you?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Darby ( 84953 )
          What does that tell you?

          That if she weighs as much as a duck, then...she's made out of wood?

          • Points for wit, I guess.

            How about: "Since the first observations date to the time of the invention of that which you need to observe the phenomenon, then we have no idea when the Spot first appeared." Another way to put it is that there have been no observations of Jupiter with sufficient resolution to see the Spot in which the Spot hasn't appeared.

    • Presumably Earth's atmosphere is just too thin to support weather systems of that longevity, although it's hard to think of a good scaling argument for why the size, thickness, mass et cetera of the atmosphere should dictate the scale of the duration of events in it.
      I have read, although I cannot find a link today, that storms on Earth fail when they cross land. Jupiter having little/no equivilent, storms persist.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Quadraginta ( 902985 )
        That's because on Earth most storms arise from the interaction of sunlight with the ocean.

        Which, come to think of it, argues that the storms we have in our atmosphere are really just manifestation of energy circulation in the hydrosphere. Maybe the Earth's atmosphere by itself is too small to sustain any significant weather systems at all. Maybe if there were no oceans, there'd be very little weather on the Earth.

        But then again, the experience of Mars suggests otherwise. Mars has no oceans, and can gener

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Twanfox ( 185252 )
          Dust of sufficiently small granularity would seem to act like a liquid.
          • As a matter of fact, it doesn't, at least not as long as it's big enough to be legitimately called "dust" (say at least 50 microns). It's very different, although there are similarities, and there's a whole field of research devoted to these so-called "granular" materials.

            One of the obvious differences is that the larger dusty and all sandy materials lacks surface tension, since they're not held together by attractive forces like the van der Waals forces holding a liquid together.

            Another interesting differ

    • Basically, Earth's size, rotation rate, and stratification only support 1-2 jet streams, and there is a lot of variability. This variability, and the strong wave-radiative potential near the jet streams does not allow large-scale coherent structure to persist for "long" periods of time. Jupiter supports many jets having nearly fixed positions, which allows coherent material eddies to persist without disruption in the mixing layers between the jets.

      Earth has similar eddies, on shorter timescales, in both

    • One of the main differences between weather systems on Jupiter and weather systems on Earth is that Earth's systems are largely fueled by a seasonal temperature differential. The energy in Jupiter's system is centralized; almost all the energy received by its rings, moons, and atmosphere is from Jupiter itself, and is a fairly even spherical distribution.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Darby ( 84953 )
      It's true that there's not much on Jupiter besides atmosphere,

      Is that really true?
      I know it's a lot of gas, and if there is a solid rocky "planet" under all that atmosphere, nobody's going to go walking around on it.
      But it (naively) seems reasonable that since it managed to collect so much material that it would have gotten enough, rock, iron, etc to make a solid planet many times the size of the earth.

      Is there some reason to expect that's not how it is?

  • It's that time... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Revenger75 ( 1246176 ) on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:56PM (#23519360)
    Jupiter is starting puberty. Now, just how long will it be before it starts to repel away from the sun?
  • Jupiter should really get that looked at, it seems to have metastasized. Yikes.

  • I blame global warming. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23, 2008 @01:05PM (#23519454)
    Look at how global warming is affecting even outer space. You SUV drivers should be ashamed.

  • Clearly... (Score:5, Funny)

    by russotto ( 537200 ) on Friday May 23, 2008 @01:19PM (#23519682) Journal
    The increased storm activity on Jupiter is a result of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I blame George Bush.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by stargazer_55 ( 1150931 )
      Ok, let's apply a bit of Monty Python logic here: Both Earth and Jupiter are experiencing climate changes. Some believe that Earth's climate change is caused by CO2 emmissions, largely blamed on use of fossil fuels by human beings. Then, we must conclude that humans exist on Jupiter and is causing it's climate change. Therefore, we are not alone! Either that or Al Gore has moved his carbon footprint to Jupiter.

  • Collision in August (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the smallest of the 3 is on a collision course with the largest. they should merge in August.

  • First it was Mars. "Better Red and Dead!" Now it's Jupiter. Oh, it starts as just one red spot. Then, when your telescope is pointed at Saturn, another appears, then another. We're on a decline that will not be stopped.

    We interrupt this rant to prevent any insipid Uranus puns.

    Move along, now. Nothing to see here.

  • I wonder who they're using Planetary Protector (Deniable) against this time?
  • You know, I looked at that picture and thought, "that makes a good work of abstract art. That would look nice hanging on my wall."

  • I bet if someone squeezes the new red spot, a giant plume of sticky white puss will come out!

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