A new study has revealed that something strange is happening in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Forty years of measurements Jupiter’s atmosphere spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have detected strange weather patterns on the Solar System’s largest planet, including periods of hot and cold during its long year (equivalent to 12 Earth years). However, it does not undergo seasonal changes like Jupiter Place does.
On Earth, the weather transitions between winter, spring, summer, and fall are the result of the planet’s axis tilting toward the plane in which it orbits. the sun🇧🇷 This 23 degree tilt allows different parts of the globe to receive different amounts of sunlight throughout the year. But Jupiter‘s axis is tilted only 3 degrees to the orbital plane of the giant planet, which means that the amount of solar radiation reaching different parts of Jupiter’s surface during a long year almost does not change. Still, the new study found periodic temperature changes around the planet’s cloud-shrouded sphere.
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“We’ve solved part of the puzzle, which shows these natural cycles of the atmosphere,” said Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in the UK and co-author of the new paper at NASA. statement (opens in new tab)🇧🇷 “To understand what drives these patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales, we need to examine both the top and bottom of the cloud layers.”
The team found signs that these off-seasons may be linked to a phenomenon known as teleconnection. Teleconnections describe periodic changes in aspects of a planet’s atmospheric system that occur simultaneously and appear unrelated and can be thousands of miles or kilometers apart.
teleconnection was observed in Earth’s atmosphere Since the 19th century, most famously in the La Nina – El Niño cycle, also known as the Southern Oscillation. Changes in the western Pacific trade winds during these events correspond to changes in precipitation over much of North America. according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In a new study, scientists have found that when temperatures rise at certain latitudes in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, the same latitudes in the southern hemisphere cool in an almost perfect mirror image.
“It was the most surprising,” said Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and lead author of the study.
“We found a connection between how temperatures change at very high latitudes,” he said. “This is similar to a phenomenon we see on Earth, where weather and climate patterns in one region can have a marked effect on weather elsewhere, and patterns of variability appear to be ‘telecoupled’ over great distances through the atmosphere.”
The measurements also revealed that as temperatures rise in the stratosphere, the upper layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere, it drops in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where weather events occur, including Jupiter’s powerful storms.
The study included data collected by telescopes since 1978, including the best ground-based telescopes. Very Large Telescope NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Chile and the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. Researchers have also used data from spacecraft such as deep space Voyager probeswhich flew past Jupiter in 1979 and the cassini missionIn 2001, it flew past Jupiter to discover Saturn.
“Measuring these temperature changes and cycles over time is a step toward eventually having a complete Jupiter weather forecast if we can piece together cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said. “And the bigger picture question is, can we ever extend this to other giant planets to see if there are similar patterns?”
Previously, scientists knew that Jupiter’s atmosphere had cold regions that appeared in lighter colors and warmer regions that appeared as brown streaks. The new study, which spans three Jovian years, reveals for the first time how these patterns change over longer periods of time.
Research (opens in new tab) It was published Monday (Dec. 19) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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