Ever since the Juno spacecraft gave us our first incredible views of Jupiter’s poles, the regions have fascinated and mesmerized us.
In one of the latest images sent by Juno to the North Pole, you can see why: a mix of connected and interconnected storm vortices that appear serene from a distance, but with an intensity we can only imagine here on Earth .
The image was obtained during Juno’s 43rd close flyby of our Solar System’s giant planet on July 5, when the spacecraft passed relatively close to 25,100 kilometers (15,600 miles) above the polar cloud tops. Because of its axial orientation, Jupiter’s poles are not visible to us most of the time, so planetary scientists rely on data from Juno to conduct studies of the atmospheric dynamics at play in these mysterious regions and stormy
The image above looks relatively serene; Get close to Jupiter’s clouds, however, and you begin to get a sense of the mind-boggling scale and ferocity of the planet’s climate, as seen in this image above processed by NASA engineer Kevin Gill , embedded below.
A close-up of Jupiter. (Kevin Gill/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
“These powerful storms can be more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) high and hundreds of miles across,” a NASA JPL spokesperson wrote on the JPL website.
“Finding out how they form is key to understanding Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as the fluid dynamics and cloud chemistry that create the planet’s other atmospheric features. Scientists are particularly interested in the different shapes, sizes and colors of the vortices “.
Each of Jupiter’s poles has its own idiosyncratic arrangement of storms. The South Pole has, or rather had, six cyclones, each comparable to the size of the continental United States, one in the center and five storms around it in an almost perfect pentagon, all spinning clockwise.
Between Juno’s flybys, scientists were able to observe the appearance of a seventh storm, so that the pentagon became a hexagon. (This differs from Saturn’s north polar hexagon, which is a hexagonally shaped storm.)
Jupiter’s North Polar Storms. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; image processing by Brian Swift)
The North Pole is even stranger: There, scientists identified nine storms, eight arranged around one in the center, all spinning counterclockwise. And, in the high-latitude regions around these two central polar concatenations of storms, other vortices rage.
Using data from Juno, scientists have identified a mechanism by which these storms stay separate rather than merging into a megastorm, as we see at Saturn’s poles. Tracking changes between Juno’s flybys is one of the most important tools planetary scientists have for understanding the wild climate on Jupiter, especially its poles.
Citizen scientists can join in the fun too. The image above was processed from raw Juno data by a citizen scientist. If you want to try it, there’s a very detailed guide here in the BBC’s Sky at Night magazine. You can find the Juno raw images here.
And citizen scientists can also help identify and classify cyclonic storms on Jupiter in Zooniverse’s Jovian Vortex Hunter. This is a tool that will directly help planetary scientists to better understand this wild world.
If you like the image above, you can download it in high resolution from the JPL NASA website.