Jupiter's Super Polar Cyclones are here to stay
The cyclones, which have never been seen before, are fixed and consistent.
Six cyclones in Jupiter’s south pole as captured by
Juno’s infrared lens in February 2017. Surprisingly organized and
resembling a round tray of cinnamon rolls, (photo credit: NASA)
NASA's
Juno space probe has revealed for the first time that Jupiter has
powerful cyclones the size of Australia across its polar regions. These
cyclones are unchanging and do not disperse like the cyclones on Earth.
A
research group from Weizmann Institute of Science discovered which
forces are at work fixing these gargantuan storms to the polar regions
and why their number and locations have remained consistent over time.
The research was published on Sunday in Nature Geoscience.
Low 3-D Flyover of Jupiter’s North Pole in Infrared. Apr 11, 2018
"We can think of Jupiter as an ideal climate laboratory," said
Prof. Yohai Kaspi of Weizmann's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department.
While Earth has a very diverse climate with oceans, continents,
atmosphere, and the influence of humans, Jupiter is made only of gas.
This makes testing hypotheses and making predictions easier.
The
data for the Jupiter research was collected by the Juno probe, which
was launched in 2011 and entered orbit in 2016. Prof. Kaspi, who is a
co-investigator on the Juno mission, witnessed discovery of the cyclones
on the planet's poles.
"If
we look at older images of Jupiter taken before 2016," said Kaspi, "we
see that the poles were commonly represented as large grey areas because
no one knew then what they actually look like." This is because the
solar system is organized on a plane that is very close to Jupiter's
equator. This means that observations from Earth and earlier space
missions could only capture the lower latitudes.
The Juno probe was special because it was the first probe that
could capture Jupiter's poles. This allowed researchers to discover
cyclones, and data gathered over the many orbits of Juno shows that the
cyclones are fixed and consistent, with eight in the north pole and five
in the south.
“This
discovery was very surprising at the time,” says Prof. Kaspi, “because
we expected the poles to be more or less symmetric.”
The
tropical cyclones that form on Earth in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
drift in circular motions toward the poles due to the planet's motion.
On Jupiter Jet streams prevent cyclones from forming under 60degree
latitude, so they can only forms above where the currant is weaker. The
cyclones are attracted to the poles but are held off by the storm at the
center of the cyclone ring.
"As
long as the cyclones remain at a distance from the pole, they are
attracted to it. But the nearer they venture, the more strongly they're
repelled," said Nimrod Gavriel, a doctorate student from Prof. Kaspi's
research team. He continued to say that latitude 84degree, where the
cyclones form, is the area pole's attraction and the repulsion effect
even out.
"We are
trying to understand atmospheric dynamics at a large scale, and
providing a successful explanation for the phenomenon of Jupiter's polar
cyclones gives us the confidence that we truly know what's going on
there," said Prof. Kaspi.
The
discovery can be essential for weather forecasting on Earth as it will
provide a greater understanding of how cyclones work. With the heating of the planet,
the movement of storms across it changes, but by understanding the
cyclones better, meteorologists can get better at predicting them.
For
Prof. Kaspi, the discovery has added excitement. "There are no new
islands to discover in the Pacific, and most planetary bodies in the
solar system have already been mapped. The poles of Jupiter and the
other gaseous planets are, perhaps, the last spots in the solar system
that are still left to explore," he said.
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