Archive Hive

When you look at Jupiter, all you see is parallel constantly-varying bands and of course the mysterious red spot. The colors observed the bands varies from yellow, orange, brown, tan, red, and even shades of blue. The red spot is evidently a storm of twice the size of Earth that has been possibly active for centuries. Jupiter’s strong gravity is exhibited by the fact that even the gas like hydrogen can not escape its atmosphere. Not much have escaped from Jupiter’s atmosphere since its formation which was around 4.6 billion years ago.

The bands we see on Jupiter’s surface are dubbed as dark and bright zones. NASA’s voyager was able to inform us about these zones. The light zones are the area where the clouds or gases of Jupiter’s atmosphere are moving upwards, that is to say towards space. The dark zones are where the gas or the cloud is sinking downward towards the planet. There is also extra material above both of these zones, and due to this these zones have abnormally high pressure. Because of Jupiter’s rapid rotation and its immense gravity, these materials are not scattered throughout Jupiter’s sky. These materials or clouds of gases are wrapped all around Jupiter. NASA sent Galileo probe to Jupiter in 1995. This probe was able to remain in Jupiter’s atmosphere for an hour before being pulverized by the high pressure level at -150km. The Galileo probe was able to record a temperature of 425 K at a depth of 150km. No complex-organic compound was found.

The red spot on Jupiter which signifies an going storm was surveyed by the scientist Robert Hooke in the mid 17th century. So we can comfortably say that that storm is at least 3 centuries old. The size of this spot changes due to the change in Jupiter’s weather. It has been surveyed that the wind rotation in this storm is counterclockwise. In addition to the Great Red Spot, there are also other ongoing storms on Jupiter. There are also holes in the clouds which appears to us as a dark hole. In modern days, scientists actually observe new storms being formed from white clouds to brown and then into red spots. The red color of these storms are mainly due to its intensity that produces ultraviolet radiation.

Jupiter has an internal source of heat. “How come” you might ask. Jupiter emits twice as much as energy that it receives from the Sun. We know that because the two probes that we sent to Jupiter recorded the top Jupiter clouds’ temperature to be 125K. But we expected it to be 105K since that is how much heat given to Jupiter courtesy of the Sun. A planet at 125K radiates (125/105K)^4. Hence our conclusion that Jupiter must be producing its own heat that it emits along with the Sun’s. We are not yet sure about how Jupiter is able to produce this energy.