New mysteries have emerged about the red dot

New mysteries about Jupiter’s iconic ‘red dot’ have been revealed. Jupiter’s big red dot is actually an anticyclonic storm with a ‘include’ depth and new results of the planet’s gravity measurements have been obtained by NASA’s Juno study, according to a study published in Science. Jupiter, though huge, is not as deep as it could have been imagined. This discovery may explain the reasons for its evolution and perhaps make it disappear.

“The results of our study attest to the mass of a storm equal to half of the Earth’s atmosphere. And is slightly smaller than all the waters of the Mediterranean, and the large red spot is an object very similar to a very large disk (its small size is equal to the diameter of the Earth) but thinner. Properties reminiscent of major hurricanes “explains Daniel Durande of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Rome Sabinsa.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system with a radius of 71,492 km. Also it is mainly made of hydrogen and helium and for this reason it is called “gas giant”. The Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm discovered in 1665 by Giantomego Cassini. Today it resembles an oval measuring approximately 16,000 x 12,000 km, making it the largest storm in the solar system. In the last 100 years, for reasons not yet known, it has declined significantly. The Great Red Spot still has many questions: one of them is about the depth to which this storm will sink into Jupiter.

The Juno study, developed by NASA with an important Italian contribution, answered this and other questions about the size of the fetus. During Jupiter’s two close flyovers (February and July 2019), NASA’s Juno mission (from July 5, 2016 to orbit Jupiter, to study the formation of the gas giant, internal structure, magnetic field, and atmosphere) first observed the large red dot closely. . Since the interior of the planet cannot be seen directly, accurate measurements of the gravitational field are used to understand its internal structure, which is the expression of the mass distribution within the planet.

Measurements of the planet’s gravitational field show that strong east-west winds (up to 360 km / h) are visible
Detecting the movement of clouds, they go to a depth of about 3000 km. Today, A new research, partly funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and coordinated by Sapienza’s former PhD student, Marzia Parisi, is now a post-doc at the California Institute of Technology / Jet Propulsion Laboratory with an international team that specializes in Sabinsa’s mechanics and astronomy. Luciano Ice, Shows how the wind of the Great Red Machine has a lower vertical penetration depth of about 300 km, more than the wind blowing on the visible bands of the planet.

The results of the work were published in the journal Science. With a very strange orbit, Juno was able to move very close to the gas giant up to 4-5,000 km above the study clouds: these distances can be highly sensitive to the acceleration of gravity exerted mainly by structures. Of the planet’s atmosphere. The spacecraft used the KaT radio science instrument – the Ka-band translator, which was developed by Thales Alenia Space-I and funded by the Italian space agency – to be able to determine the vertical extension of the Great Red Spot to the heart of the experiment.

The Great Red Spot has invisibly disrupted Juno’s orbit, But the extreme accuracy of the measurement (up to 0.01 mm / s) was able to capture a very weak gravitational signal, thus being able to estimate depths of about 300 km.

“Juno’s actions – Luciano Ice concludes Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Rome Sabinsa – They presented the third dimension of Jupiter’s atmosphere, which has caught the attention of many of us., As well as astronomers for more than three hundred years, it certainly shows a very detailed shallow storm, but very shallow. This new move will help to understand its nature, its evolution and, perhaps, its possible disappearance.