Lia Siegelman was was just studying the swirling waters of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, when she came across this poster image of tornadoes around Jupiter’s north pole, taken by NASA Juno spaceship. “I looked at it, and I was really surprised: ‘Wow, this looks like waves in the ocean,’ she said.
So Siegelman, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, turned his eyes to the latest detail. image of the outer planet. She and her team have demonstrated for the first time that a type of convection seen on Earth explains the physical forces and sources of energy that create tornadoes on Jupiter. (Since air and water are both “liquids,” from a physics standpoint, the same principles apply to the atmospheres of the gas giants and our oceans.) They published their findings. I’m in the magazine today Natural Physics.
Jupiter, the four-pound elephant in our solar system, creates giant tornadoes, massive storms that swirl around areas of low pressure. Some are thousands of miles wide — as wide as the continental United States — with winds of up to 250 miles per hour. Eight of the largest have been discovered at the planet’s north pole and five at the south pole. Scientists have speculated for years about their origins, but by mapping these storms and measuring their wind speeds and temperatures, Siegelman and her colleagues have shown how they really are. formed. Small spinning eddies appeared here and there among the turbulent clouds — not much different from the ocean eddies Siegelman was familiar with — and then they began to merge. She says that vortexes grow by continuously devouring smaller clouds and drawing energy from them, so that they continue to rotate.
It’s a clever way to study extreme weather on a planet more than 500 million miles away. “The authors are clearly drawn from the disciplines of meteorology and oceanography. Morgan O’Neill, a Stanford atmospheric scientist who has modeled the physics of storms and tornadoes on Earth and has applied his work to Saturn.
In particular, says O’Neill, the team of scientists has demonstrated how, like thunderstorms on Earth, Jupiter’s cyclones form through a process with a crude-sounding name: humid convection”. Warm, less dense air, deep in the planet’s atmosphere, gradually rises, while colder and denser air, near the icy vacuum of space, drifts down. This creates turbulence, which can be seen in Jupiter’s swirling, moisture-filled ammonia clouds.
