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New ground-breaking thermal images obtained with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and composition with its colour.

This spot has been sort-of recognizable identity for this huge planet. Amateur astronomers can also watch it from small telescopes, but why and how it is there was long a mystery. This spot is as big as 3 earths together. If it is to be a storm, then it is perhaps the biggest storm in our solar system. But now better instruments allow to map it in details to understand its characteristics.

The thermal images were mostly obtained with the VISIR [1] instrument attached to ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, with additional data coming from the Gemini South telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. … VISIR allows the astronomers to map the temperature, aerosols and ammonia within and surrounding the storm. Each of these parameters tells us how the weather and circulation patterns change within the storm, both spatially (in 3D) and with time.

These observations allowed to put some contraints on scientific speculations on the composition of these spots. And the final findings were:

“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition — and the actual colour of the Great Red Spot,” says Fletcher.

Source: Jupiter’s Spot Seen Glowing

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