According to a new analysis performed by NASA’s Cassini unmanned spacecraft, the big red spot on Jupiter is actually a result of simple chemicals being broken apart by sunlight in the planet’s atmosphere, not beneath Jupiter’s clouds.
The results were obtained by Kevin Baines, a Cassini team scientists based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena California, and colleagues Bob Carlson and Tom Momary, after the team re-examined data obtained from Cassini’s December 2000 Jupiter flyby and performed a series of in-house experiments aiming to duplicate the color.
The researchers blasted gases known to exist on Jupiter, ammonia and acetylene, with ultraviolet light to simulate the sun’s effects on the materials preset at the height of the planet’s big Great Red Spot. The end result was a reddish material that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Great Red Spot as it was observed by Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). They observed that the light-scattering properties of their red concoction accurately matched a model of the Great Red Spot in which the red-colored material is restrained to the uppermost reaches of the giant cyclone-like feature.
“Our models suggest most of the Great Red Spot is actually pretty bland in color, beneath the upper cloud layer of reddish material,” said Baines. “Under the reddish 'sunburn' the clouds are probably whitish or grayish.” The appearance of a coloring agent at the top of the clouds is inconsistent with the previous theory which states that the spot is red due to upwelling chemicals formed beneath the cloud layers. Baines asserts that if that were the case, then the red spot would much significantly redder.
Scientists are interested in studying Jupiter’s atmosphere because hues in the planet’s clouds reveal different combinations of elements, which in turn allude to the planet’s elemental make-up.
Source: NASA
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