Juno, NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft, has discovered a new giant storm on the planet. While giant storms on this planet are not surprising, this storm in particular did something amazing: it has shouldered its way into a ring of storms found at Jupiter’s south pole, which converted the tiny pentagon of evenly spaced storms into a hexagon of evenly spaced storms.
“One of the very first things we discovered at Jupiter is that the poles don’t look like the rest of the planet,” Steve Levin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
When Juno arrived in 2016, he adds, one of its finds was that the south pole had a giant central storm surrounded by a ring of five others. “Now we have six,” he says.
[...]
When the original storms, all of them about 7000 kilometres across, were first discovered (the new storm is about one-third as big), scientists were amazed by their symmetrical arrangement. But the recent change is even more amazing.
(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SWRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)
Newest 1 Comment
Van Gogh in red
Abusive comment hidden.
(Show it anyway.)