For the first time, astronauts have now measured winds in the central atmosphere of Jupiter, also studying what happened after a comet crash from the 1990s. They have found that the “powerful winds” on the planet have blown the largest in the solar system at an extreme speed of up to 1450 kilometers per hour, especially near the poles. “This could represent a specific meteorological animal in our Solar System,” said researchers in a study published by ESO, the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere. The winds on Jupiter were first identified by an ESO JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
“Jupiter’s famous cloud bands are located in the low atmosphere, where winds have previously been measured. But it is more difficult to monitor winds above this atmospheric level, in the stratosphere, because there are no clouds, ”scientists said in the news. Later, they revealed that, using the Atacama Large Millimeter or Submillimeter Array (ALMA) sensitive telescope, a team of researchers was able to measure the planet’s powerful stratospheric winds where the blue stripes lie. all the way in the ionosphere.
[Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impacting Jupiter in July 1994. Credit: ESO]
[Photos from ESO La Silla observatory show the individual nuclei of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, now headed for collision with Jupiter. Credit: ESO]
“But what was not expected was what we saw near the poles,” said planetary scientist at Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, who was also the lead author of the study, Thibault Cavalié.
Scientists found that the speed of the wind, which was shaking in an immeasurable direction at the poles, launched them at an alarming speed of 300-400 meters per second. Another planetary scientist in Berkeley who previously used ALMA said that seeing such fast winds blowing was “very harsh” and that the strange polar winds were blowing north-south instead of east. and the west commonly “soft-minded” to researchers.
Measuring Jupiter’s stratosphere ‘a challenge’
Previously, scientists were already measuring the Jupiter troposphere, however, this is the first time they have studied wind speeds near the equator and poles. Jupiter’s winds across the troposphere of the planet blow east and west within the planet’s curved and flat white stripes, however, at the vortices like Jupiter’s crooked eye winds blow in a hurricane-like wind.
Astronomers have also been seeing the vibrant cry called aurorae near the poles of Jupiter, and moving clouds of moving gas. Measuring Jupiter’s stratosphere was a challenging task since there are no clouds in this region of the atmosphere and astronomers were tracking the alternate path of a Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that helped them track molecules of hydrogen cyanide. As a result of these molecules stratospheric “jets” were measured. The discovery of these strong stratospheric winds near the poles of Jupiter was a “real surprise,” astronomers in the study said.