Jupiter's Third Red Spot

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."

Comments

Three eyed monster

[Bananatree3]

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?

earthly parallels to the Spot?

[Quadraginta]

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:earthly parallels to the Spot?

[Mr Z]

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:earthly parallels to the Spot?

[Quadraginta]

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 generate enormous and long-lasting storms.

Back to square one.

One of the articles is wrong.

[Chris Burke]

The second article in the story claims that the Big Red Spot is "roughly as wide as the entire Earth", which of course is wrong it's about 3 times the diameter of earth, as the first and correct article claims.

So their problem wasn't reading too fast, it was clicking the wrong link. ;)

Re:I see what YOU did there

[badinsults]

Yeah, climate scientists are just going to ignore the #1 factor that controls natural climate change when they are making their climate models. :p

The IPCC has a nice graph that shows the magnitude of various forcings on climate change. The chapter that has this is right here (pdf). Ultimately, the concensus amoung scientists are that natural solar forcing is minor compared to man-made forcings. That is not to say there isn't an effect, and certainly the observations of climate change on Jupiter and Mars is evidence of this.