With intense winds, the Great Red Spot (in blue in the closeup) is surrounded by intriguing structures, such as dark arcs and bright spotsESA / Webb, NASA e CSA
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, has a characteristic feature south of its equator: an area of permanent high-pressure, 30% larger than the diameter of the Earth, dominated by a perennial counterclockwise vortex. This huge anticyclone appears on the surface of Jupiter as the Great Red Spot. The region immediately above the spot has never attracted much attention and seems to contain nothing of particular interest. But observations made in July 2022 by one of the instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope, operated by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), suggest that this assumption is a mistake. Using Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec), a team of astrophysicists identified complex structures just above the spot, including dark arcs and bright spots, which still need to be explained. “We thought this region, perhaps naively, would be really boring,” Henrik Melin, an astrophysicist from the University of Leicester, UK, who led the study, said in a press release. “Jupiter never ceases to surprise” (Nature Astronomy, June).
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