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.