http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/02mar_redjr.htm?list771283
Yeah -- but in that case, who's down there painting them all red? Disgruntled natives?
Didn't mention this so far...
Veeery interesting, I wonder if Hubble or Keck AO didn't take some recent image of this baby...
It's interesting to read the the Great Red Spot is apparently less great and less red in recent decades. Could this be the end for the larger storm?
The appearance of two big red storms also makes me curious as to whether there are any gaps in the observational record that make the common "300 year old storm" assertion a stretch.
I can't wait to see Kecks or Hubbles views.
Pioneer 10 saw a similar smaller red spot during its historic flyby
in 1973.
Here is an image of it from the online NASA Pioneer Odyssey book:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/p116b.jpg
Was this one seen from Earth as well at the time? I wonder what
the frequency of such storms are on Jupiter?
If I remember right that was in the northern hemisphere.
Only image of this "new Red Spot" that I have seen is dated February 27th...
Are there any new images from any telescope?
B)-->
A new animation ...
On March 12th, Mike Salway of Australia made this 90-minute movie using a 10-inch telescope and a CCD video camera:
Photo in the News: Jupiter Spawns a New Red Spot
March 7, 2006—Look out, Great Red Spot. A brash young contender may be aiming for your title of Solar System's Most Powerful Storm.
NASA announced Friday that a new red spot has been born on Jupiter, as seen in a February 27 photograph (at top) by an amateur astronomer.
The new, formerly white spot—actually a storm named Oval BA—has been swirling since at least 2000 but acquired the familiar blushing tint of its centuries-old cousin only a few weeks ago. Nicknamed "Red, Jr.," Oval BA formed as three tempests gradually combined into a single superstorm, as seen in the bottom set of images.
So why are the storms red? No one really knows, but some scientists suggest that these miles-high vortices suck up material from lower altitudes. Once exposed to the sun's rays, the theory goes, the material reddens.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0307_060307_jupiter.html
There are several great images here: http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/
Quote from Spaceweather.com:
MEANWHILE ON JUPITER things are getting weird. Two anti-cyclones are bumping
into Jupiter's new red spot, "Red Jr." Together, the trio strangely resemble
Mickey Mouse.
Visit http://spaceweather.com for more information and pictures of Jupiter and
the Zodiacal Lights.
One red coloring agent proposed years ago.... dunno the current status of the hypothesis.... was red phosphorous... made from the observed trace gas phosphine, PH3.
According to http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/ site, "On mid-April 2006, a group of professional astronomers lead by Dr Imke de Pater and Dr Phil Marcus (UC Berkeley) will use the Hubble Space Telescope to image both the GRS and Red Spot Jr".
Do someone knows if/when images will be published?
Yes, I already saw images/animations and they are beautiful.
Is incredible to see which results can be obtained by skilled people using a less-than-30cm telescope!
However, I was looking for HST (or at least some ground AO image) in order to finally see the new red spot details...
Finally!
Is beautifull!!
Also in APOD page now....
New great images from Hubble and from Earth:
http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1724_1.asp
"Measurements by Simon-Miller of her team's HST image give a long-axis dimension of 13,480 km for Oval BA and 20,740 km for the Great Red Spot". Guys, this baby is approximately Earth-sized!
http://www.redspotjr.com/
I have impression that distance between GRS and JRS is slightly tightened in the last month...
less than 2 months to collision???
It amazes me how much amateur observations have increased in clarity.
I can't even imagine what the next 10 years brings!
While it is simply amazing that amateur astronomers nowadays produce better images than professional observatories did a couple of decades ago, I don't believe this trend will continue much longer by improving cameras and increasing telescope apertures. Even now, image quality is most strongly affected by atmospheric seeing and without adaptive optics, you can't squeeze out a much larger resolution, no matter how good equipment you have.
On the other hand, it'll be interesting to follow advances in adaptive optics over the years and how affordable they'll become to amateur guys. Check out http://planetary.org/blog/article/00000569/, there's a neat Keck montage showing just how AO improved in only 4 years. The next big quantum leap in amateur observing will surely come when (if?) AO becomes affordable. It's still best suited for infrared observations, though.
ugordan Thanks for posting that.
The two spots are even closer now, look to http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/ site. He say:
NASA Science News for June 5, 2006
The two biggest storms in the solar system are about to go bump in the night, in plain view of backyard telescopes.
FULL STORY at
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/05jun_redperil.htm?list161084
closer and closer:
I hope that WFPC2 on Hubble is still working fine, unlike ACS and that they are planing to use it to observe this close encounter event...
is it just me or is the spot turning the white band orange?
edit- or at least-why is the one side white and the other orange?
The band the LRS is travelling in seems to be entirely south of the GRS; I don't see why they shouldn't just pass by without much, if any, interaction.
The expectation is that they'll just breeze past. There was an exhibition meeting of the BAA in Cambridge last weekend, and the director of the Jupiter Section showed images that demonstrate that new spot is getting darker and darker red over time, coinciding with it speeding up - and also, the GRS is getting smaller and lighter ( over the past century or so ) suggesting an opposite trend.
Doug
Doug, are you talking about a possible passdown between the two spots? Would be great to see this, even if time scale of the two events (GRS fading and RSJr reddening) seems completely different...
Now almost touching!
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0607/21jupiter/
definately not colliding. beautiful gemini image
From the latest issue of the journal http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/index.html:
Oscillating motion of the Jovian Great Red Spot and Numerical Experiments with IG equation
Tadashi Asada and Isao Miyazaki
Earth Planets Space 58, 905-910 (2006)
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/abstract/5807/58070905.html
New images from Keck:
http://www.keckobservatory.org/article.php?id=88
New article:
- http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0610/10jupiterspots/ (Spaceflight Now)
Red Jr's winds now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour (wind speed of Great Red Spot).
Why Red Jr's intensity is growing stronger? Change in size or ...
<< According to the team, the increased intensity of the Little Red Spot probably explains why it changed color. >>
So why are the storms red?
Scientists are still puzzled… sulfur, germanium oxide and various carbon compounds have been proposed as an explanation but the coloring agents still remain an enigma…
I'm curious: is the progenitor to Red Jr. the big, while oval that Cassini saw in 2000?
http://m1.freeshare.us/view/?128fs1460987.png
It certainly looks conspicuous. The funky composite is a MT3/MT2/UV1 as RGB. The oval appears bright in MT3 and very dark in UV so it turns out orange in the composite.
I've been trying to track down the origin of that storm too. Jupiter is hard because no cloud features stay put -- stuff at different latitudes shifts with respect to each other with timescales measured in days, and stuff at different longitudes but the same latitude shifts on slightly longer timescales.
According to some image captions on Photojournal the three white ovals first formed in the 1930s.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00011, from July 1979. You can see three large white ovals of roughly equal size in the band just south of the Great Red Spot. One is just below the spot, the other two are some distance away.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/solar%20system/jupiter/1991/13/image/a/, with just one of the spots showing up. And http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/solar%20system/jupiter/1994/47/image/a/ in July 1994, where you can barely make out the positions of the white spots. They're much closer together than they were in 1979.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01262 from February 1995. Three white ovals are now immediately adjacent. The caption says that the outer two white spots are ones that formed in the 1930s. What's the center one then? This caption also refers to another view from seven months earlier -- I haven't tracked that one down yet. There's http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/solar%20system/jupiter/1995/18/image/b/, but there's no caption information saying when it was taken.
Galileo was in position to witness their merger in February 1998 but was of course only able to return tight views. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01650 from February 1997 and September 1998. It says that two of the storms were called BC and DE after they formed. What was the third one called? What's the significance of these names? There's a whole bunch more of the February 1997 views http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00700, http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00873, http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00872, http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00871, and http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00870...and 13 more...as well as a blinky http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01231.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02864, from October 2000. You see just the one oval, roughly 150 degrees of longitude away from the Great Red Spot. So, yes, ugordan, that's the progenitor to Little Red.
--Emily
Somebody mis-natigated and a Vogon ship fullof RED NUMBER TWO collided with Jupiter.
The constantly changing appearance of Jupiter's atmosphere is a fascinating subject. Many of these changes are quite obvious in amateur astronomical telescopes once you are familiar with Jupiter.
The origin of this 'new' red spot can be traced back to 1939 when the three white ovals seen in the Voyager images started forming. They were formed as a result of changes in three separate locations in the South Temperate Zone. Originally they were very long but then steadily contracted, rapidly at first. They were extremely similar to the GRS. These three ovals were known as BC, DE and FA. As previously noted, originally they were very long. At that time they were separated by dark segments known as AB, CD and EF.
In 1998 ovals DE and BC merged into a single oval labeled BE. In March 2000 ovals BE and FA merged into a single white oval (oval BA) visible in the Cassini images. In 2005 this single surviving oval started changing color and in 2006 it had turned red. Interestingly, HST observations revealed that wind speeds in the spot increased after it turned red.
There is a huge amount of information on Jupiter's long term behavior in John Rogers' excellent book The Giant Planet Jupiter (to anyone interested in this subject: If you don't have it, get it!). Patrick Irwin's Giant Planets of Our Solar System discusses this in less detail but from a more technical perspective. There's also some information http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0610/10jupiterspots/ and in particular http://www.redspotjr.com/.
Perhaps even more interestingly, the GRS may disappear in a few decades. It has been steadily contracting and if the same trend continues, by 2040 or so it will be circular. That's believed to be an unstable configuration so something interesting is going to happen - the big question is, exactly what?
Finally I'll end this by venting my frustration: I cannot observe Jupiter until 2010 due to my northerly latitude .
John is the BAA's Jupiter Section director - and I saw a great talk by him a while back where he suggested that the current GRS might not be the one that is supposed to have been visible for so long - but is actually the second GRS since recorded observations of Jupiter begun hundreds of years ago.
Also - the current spot is 'speeding up'. In 1950 it was rotating in around 10 to 12 days. Now it's more like 4 - 6 days - but at the same time it's getting smaller so one can't assume it's getting faster as a result
Observations of Jupiter are one of the great amateur projects still ongoing.
Doug
Fascinating idea that this might not be Galileo's GRS...but if you think about it this makes sense. Jupiter's atmosphere is so dynamic that it's ridiculous to think of the GRS as a permanent feature in terms of geological time.
I recall some simulations a few years ago that indicated that a Spot-like storm almost always arose given a Jovian planet's assumed atmospheric properties, rotation rate, etc. But, it apparently doesn't have to be the same Spot every time. My question is whether two or more of similar magnitudes could be sustained, or does one have to die before another can fully form?
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