Red Spot is hurricane on Jupiter
Close-up of Jupiter's cloudtops as seen by Voyager 1. The red area - Jupiter's Great Red Spot seen for centuries through telescopes - is thought now to be a giant hurricane. (NASA image)
Why does the planet Jupiter have a big hurricane on it?
This massive storm on the planet Jupiter is known as the Great Red Spot. It’s been seen since the first telescopes were aimed skyward in the early 1600s – and for all we know it raged on Jupiter long before that. Jupiter’s Red Spot is enormous by earthly standards – two planet Earths would fit side by side in front of it.
As to why it’s raging, planetary scientists still don’t know how or when the Great Red Spot originated. But the reason the storm’s still going may be partly that Jupiter is a gas-giant world. When we look at it we see only the tops of its clouds. Here on Earth, hurricanes slow down or fall apart when they pass over land, but Jupiter doesn’t have any land. What’s more, the temperature at Jupiter’s equator is about the same as at its poles. There aren’t the differences in temperature from one place to another that account for our weather shifts on Earth.
So this storm on Jupiter continues to rage, with winds at over 250 miles an hour. It spins in a counterclockwise direction, rolling like a ball bearing between a jet stream on top flowing west and a jet stream below flowing east.
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