To get your working week off to a good start, a great scientific or technical image on our site every Monday. This time: Hubble has taken new images of Jupiter and its storms.
On August 25, when Jupiter was 653 million kilometers from Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope decided to capture the planet. This resulted in a record that gives scientists an update on the ‘weather conditions’ that prevail there.
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That dot to the left of the gas giant is not a lost pixel, but the planet’s smallest moon: Europe.
New stain?
Prominent presence in the photo is of course the Great Red Spot; an anti-cyclone with a diameter of 15,800 kilometers large enough to be visible with telescopes from Earth.
But at the top left of the red spot, in the planet’s northern hemisphere, another striking storm area is visible. This whirlwind moves at a speed of no less than 560 kilometers per hour.
New storms appear on Jupiter more often, but astronomers suspect that this specimen is here to stay because it appears to have more structure.
Source: Hubble Space Telescope
Image: Left: Jupiter in the visible spectrum, right: multi-wavelength observation in ultraviolet / visible / near infrared light. © NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and MH Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team
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