Something strange is happening in Jupiter’s atmosphere

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A new study revealed that something strange is happening in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Forty years of measurements of Jupiter’s atmosphere by spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have revealed strange weather patterns on the largest planet in the solar system, including hot and cold periods during its long year (the equivalent of 12 Earth years). But Jupiter does not go through seasonal changes like Earth.

On Earth, weather transitions between winter, spring, summer, and fall are the result of the tilt of the planet’s axis toward the plane in which it orbits the sun. This tilt of 23 degrees causes different parts of the globe to receive varying amounts of sunlight throughout the year. But Jupiter’s axis is tilted towards the giant planet’s orbital plane by only 3 degrees, which means that the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of Jupiter’s surface throughout its long year hardly changes. However, the new study found periodic temperature fluctuations occurring around the cloud-covered globe.

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“We’ve solved one piece of the puzzle now, and that is that the atmosphere shows these natural cycles,” Fletcher, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in the UK and co-author of the new paper, told NASA. Statement (Opens in a new tab). “To understand what is driving these patterns and why they occur at these specific time scales, we need to explore both the overcast and beneath cloudy layers.”

The team found indications that these off-seasons may have something to do with a phenomenon known as telecommuting. Telecommunication describes periodic changes in aspects of a planet’s atmospheric system that occur simultaneously in seemingly disconnected parts of the globe that can be thousands of miles or kilometers away.

Distance communication has been observed in Earth’s atmosphere since the 19th century, most notably in the famous La Niña-El Niño cycle, also known as the Southern Oscillation. During these events, changes in the trade winds in the western Pacific coincide with changes in precipitation across much of North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In the new research, scientists found that on Jupiter, when temperatures rise at specific latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the same latitudes in the southern hemisphere cool, almost like a perfect mirror image.

“This was the most surprising of all,” Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and lead author of the study, said in the release.

“We found a link between how temperatures differ at very distant latitudes,” he said. “It’s similar to a phenomenon we see on Earth, where weather and climate patterns in one region can have a marked effect on weather in another, with patterns of variation seemingly ‘tele-connected’ across vast distances through the atmosphere.”

The measurements also revealed that when temperatures rise in the stratosphere, the upper layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere, they fall into the troposphere, the lowest layer in the atmosphere, where weather events, including Jupiter’s powerful storms, occur.

The study included data from 1978 onwards, collected by some of the best ground-based telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope in Chile and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility and the Subaru Telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. The researchers also used data from spacecraft such as the deep-space probes Voyager, which flew by Jupiter in 1979, and the Cassini mission, which flew by Jupiter in 2001 on its way to exploring Saturn.

“Measuring these changes in temperatures and periods over time is a step toward eventually obtaining a complete forecast of Jupiter’s weather, if we can relate cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said in the release. “The bigger question is whether we can one day extend this to other giant planets to see if they show similar patterns.”

Previously, scientists knew that Jupiter’s atmosphere features cooler regions that appear in lighter colors and warmer regions that appear as brown bands. The new study, which covers a period of three Jovian years, reveals for the first time how these patterns change over longer periods of time.

The study (opens in a new tab) was published in Nature Astronomy on Monday (December 19).

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