Tag: Juno

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated so that north is up and then reduced slightly to post here, was created by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos from a raw photo taken by Juno during its 44th orbit of Jupiter.

To bring out the details Thomopoulos enhanced the colors, then enlarged the entire photo and cropped the area of interest.

Unfortunately, the Juno team that releases these photos does not provide information for easily establishing scale. In an email to me Thomopoulos noted that the largest circular storm in the northern half of the image is likely a vortex, which on Jupiter tend to range from 600 to 3,500 miles in diameter. He also noted that Juno was a little less than 27,000 miles away from Jupiter when this photo was snapped on August 17, 2022. Thus, I suspect this particular vortex sits on the larger end of that size range, which makes it a little less than half the size of the Earth.

As for the colors, as with many similar Juno images, the white clouds appear to almost always sit at the top of these storms and jets, almost like thunderheads.

Though the largest feature here is that large vortex to the north, most of the gigantic Jupiter storms visible seem instead to form as bands, the storms churning about madly as they are driven along the gas giant’s very fast ten hour rotation period.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was processed by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos from a raw image taken by the Jupiter orbiter Juno on August 17, 2022.

The orbiter was 18,354 miles above the cloud tops when the image was snapped. It shows a stormy cloud band in the southern hemisphere.

You can get a sense of the processing that Thomospoulos did by comparing this image with the raw photo. The original has almost no contrast, either in color or in contrast. By enhancing both Thomospoulos makes the violent nature of these large storms, thousands of miles in size, quite visible.

Click for original figure.

Scientists using Juno data of Jupiter’s magnetic field, combined with computer modeling, have now produced a rough map of the gas giant’s internal structure.

The image to the right, figure 2, of their paper, shows that structure. I have annotated the figure to provide some sense of scale. The bold violet line indicates their conclusions about the size of the dynamo that drives Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, comprising more than 80 percent of the planet’s internal diameter. From the caption:

The gray area depicts the core (0.2 RJ) and the possible dilute core region. The violet area between the dotted lines (0.68 and 0.84 RJ) depicts the [hydrogen-helium] phase separated layer. The top dotted line at 0.95 RJ depicts the depth where the jets decay down to the minimum. The arrows represent possible convection area with unknown origin depth.

While this is a good first hypothesis based on the available data, that data remains quite sparse and uncertain. Thus, the conclusions here must be taken with a great deal of skepticism.

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After four years of observations by Juno in orbit around Jupiter, scientists studying the storms at the gas giant’s poles have found that those storms are stable, long-lasting features. From the abstract of their paper:

These data have shown cyclones organized in snowflake-like structures. The Jupiter’s polar cyclones are long-lasting features, which did not disappear or merge during four years of observations.

The image to the right, posted by me earlier this week, shows several of these storms, or vortices, at Jupiter’s north pole. Previous work had documented the overall pattern, as described in the paper:

The observed vortices display geometrical symmetries around both poles: circumpolar cyclones (CPCs), organized in a regular pattern, surround a central one. At the north pole, eight circumpolar vortices form an octagonal structure, while at the south pole, five circumpolar vortices are arranged in a pentagonal pattern; both central polar vortices show some degree of displacements to the geometrical pole, about 0.5° for the Northern Polar Cyclone (NPC) and 1°-2° for the Southern Polar Cyclone (SPC).

While this research has found little change in these storms over four years, it is unknown what their long term evolution will be for an entire Jupiter year, twelve Earth years long.

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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 5, 2022 during Juno’s 43rd close fly-by of Jupiter, and was enhanced by citizen scientist Brian Swift. It shows a group of storms, what planetary scientists have labeled “vortices” near Jupiter’s north pole.

These powerful storms can be over 30 miles (50 kilometers) in height and hundreds of miles across. Figuring 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 vortices’ varying shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, cyclones, which spin counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern, and anti-cyclones, which rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere, exhibit very different colors and shapes.

The image highlights the type of storm Juno scientists are asking the pubic to category in a new citizen scientist project called Jovian Vortex Hunter. You go to its website and go through Juno images, noting and categorizing them. So far more than 2,400 volunteers have marked up more than 375,000 storms.

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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was created from a raw image from the Jupiter orbiter Juno by citizen scientist Sergio Diaz-Ruiz. As he notes in his caption:

Several jet streams at high latitude, near the north pole of the planet, crowned by clouds, contrast with a dark oval just over the center.

The original was taken on February 25, 2022 during Juno’s fortieth close approach to Jupiter. As Diaz-Ruiz notes, the contrast with the dark oval and the higher lighter clouds is striking. It is almost as if thermals rising over that oval are pushing the lighter clouds away.

This is only the fourth Juno image that Diaz-Ruiz has processed. All are quite stunning, and worth a look.

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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was created by citizen scientists Kevin Gill and Navaneeth Krishnan from a raw image taken by Juno during its 40th close fly-by of Jupiter in February 2022.

I don’t have a scale, but I would guess that this storm is at least a thousand miles across. The depth is harder to measure, but we looking down into a deep whirlpool for sure.

To bring out the details Gill and Krishnan enhanced the colors significantly. The original is quite bland in comparison, with this storm being the faint dark spot just below the center near the photo’s left edge.

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The cool image to the right is another Juno photo of Jupiter enhanced by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt. This time Eichstädt also did some analysis of the motions and interactions of many vortices found in the northern polar regions of Jupiter. The image to the right has been cropped and reduced to post here, with the state of Arizona, about 400 by 300 miles in size, added for scale. There is more annotation in the full image.

As Eichstädt writes:

Large vortices in an atmosphere layer of a rotating planet can be roughly split into two classes, cyclonic and anticyclonic vortices.

Based on this rough classification, two interacting vortices can either be of the same or of opposite sign. Tightly interacting vortices of opposite sign tend to mutually propel each other, hence the whole pair, if they are of similar strength and size.

Tightly interacting vortex pairs of the same sign tend to merge. More distant like-signed vortex pairs may essentially repel each other. Interacting vortices tend to create filaments, some of which may split into fragments and further collapse into streets of small eddies.

He also notes that in future orbits Juno will provide closer views of this stormy region, as with the orbit the closest point shifts northward.

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt has created a two-image blink animation from Juno images of Jupiter that shows the changes in the two oppositely rotating storm vortices, shown on the right. As he notes.

Two vortices or eddies, one cyclonic, the other one anticyclonic, can propell themselves mutually and slowly within the overall context they are embedded in.

…The rotation of the two vortices is perceptible in the image sequence taken within nine minutes. The cyclonic eddy is located at the left, the anticyclonic one at the right. The motion of the vortex pair, however, is too slow to be resolved. But the morphology of the cloud tops points towards a relative upward motion in this rendition.

That the two storms also invoke face I am sure also had something to do with his decision to showcase this data. Unlike the face on Mars, this face is real, though relatively temporary. It will eventually break apart as Jupiter’s storms evolve.

The animation can be seen at the link.

Cool movie time! Using images produced by Juno in orbit around Jupiter, citizen scientist Kevin Gill has produced a very nice movie of the spacecraft’s 27th fly-by on June 2, 2020.

During the closest approach of this pass, the Juno spacecraft came within approximately 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) of Jupiter’s cloud tops. At that point, Jupiter’s powerful gravity accelerated the spacecraft to tremendous speed — about 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet.

I have embedded the movie below the fold. The choice of a piece of music by Vangellis might seem hokey, but I think in this case it works very nicely. I also was impressed with the addition of some 3D depth near the movie’s beginning.
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Cool movie time! Below is a short movie created by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt from images taken by Juno as it swung past Jupiter on its 28th close pass since arriving in orbit in 2016.

In natural colors, Jupiter looks pretty pale. Therefore, the still images are approximately illumination-adusted, i.e. almost flattened, and consecutively gamma-stretched to the 4th power of radiometric values, in order to enhance contrast and color.

Like for all its previous flybys, Juno approached Jupiter roughly from north, and left Jupiter looking towards the soutern hemisphere. Closest approach to Jupiter was 3,500 km above the nominal IAU 1-bar level, and near 25.3 degrees north (planetocentric), according to long-term planning of November 2017.

Click for full illustration.

Using data from Juno, scientists now theorize that Jupiter produces what they dub “shallow lightning” as well as ammonia-water hailstones dubbed “mushballs.”

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is only an artist’s illustration of the lightning. Sadly Juno’s camera doesn’t have the resolution to capture such flashes.

An unexpected form of electrical discharge, shallow lightning originates from clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, whereas lightning on Earth originates from water clouds.

Other new findings suggest the violent thunderstorms for which the gas giant is known may form slushy ammonia-rich hailstones Juno’s science team calls “mushballs”; they theorize that mushballs essentially kidnap ammonia and water in the upper atmosphere and carry them into the depths of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

As with the InSight results below, there is much uncertainty with these results, especially the hypothesis of mushballs. These features fit their present data from Juno, but we must remember that the data is still somewhat superficial.

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Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and reduced to post here, was taken by Juno during its 28th close orbital fly-by of Jupiter, and then processed by citizen scientist Hemant Dara.

While not the first Juno image of the poles of Jupiter, this photo illustrates very well the evolution of the gas giant’s deep atmosphere as you move from the equator to the pole. From the equator to the high mid-latitudes the planet’s rotation, producing a day only 10 hours long, organizes that atmosphere into jet streams that form the bands that astronomers have spied from Earth since the first telescopes.

At the pole the influence of that rotation seems to wane, or at least influence the atmosphere differently, so that the storms seem to form randomly and incoherently.

The image also shows that there appear to be several types of storms at the south pole. Some appear as tight spirals, similar to hurricanes. Others appear chaotic, with no consistent shape, almost like clouds on Earth.

The processes that would explain all this are not yet understood, in the slightest, and won’t be until we get orbiters at Jupiter able to watch the atmosphere continuously, as we do here on Earth. Then it will be possible to assemble movies of the formation and dissipation of these storms, and begin (only begin) to decipher what causes them.

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Cool image time! The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was color enhanced by citizen scientist Emma Walimaki from the original Juno image in order to bring out the features and storms visible in the upper storm layers of Jupiter.

The photo was taken during Juno’s 25th close fly-by of the gas giant, and thus we are only seeing a small portion of Jupiter’s sphere.

In comparing this image with the original, it appears that Walimaki simply made the colors that were already there brighter and more distinctive. Thus, these colors represent real data. Jupiter’s cloud tops are really blue, orange, tan, and brown, unlike Earth’s consistently and boringly white water clouds.