NASA's decades of observation of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, revealed strange temperature patterns in the cosmic body's atmosphere.
Scientists discovered unexplained climate patterns on the planet that repeat periodically in years-long cycles. Another mysterious thing that experts found was that they mirrored each other in each hemisphere.
Jupiter's Strange Temperature Patterns
The new finding posed new and intriguing questions about Jupiter, as well as other giant gas worlds that orbit alien stars. Our solar system's largest planet is so massive that it could contain 1,300 Earths, a size that makes it one of the brightest objects in the sky.
In the last few centuries, humans used telescopes to reveal the mesmerizing tempests that swirl across the planet's upper sky layers. Furthermore, visiting spacecraft confirmed that the planet's atmosphere is unimaginably complex.
A senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, Glenn Orton, has long been watching Jupiter using a backyard telescope. Orton and his colleagues spotted tantalizing signs of weird climate patterns on the planet in the 1990s, as per Vice.
However, researchers needed a specific set of long-term infrared data for them to get a sense of the bigger picture of the planet's environment. Now, Orton and several of his colleagues have discovered "unexpected seasonal and non-seasonal periodicities."
They also found other "associated puzzles" after conducting infrared observations of the large planet in the span of four decades, which was detailed in a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.
According to Gizmodo, the study is the longest ever to track temperatures in Jupiter's atmosphere, said NASA. In the troposphere of the planet, which is the lowest region of the atmosphere, the environment is similar to our planet where most weather occurs.
NASA's Decades-Long Research of Gas Giant
In order for scientists to research Jupiter's troposphere, they observed the planet's infrared glow, which is brighter for warmer areas in the atmosphere. They began their study in 1978 and continued it for the next 40 years.
Prior studies of the large planet's atmosphere typically covered periods shorter than the planet's 12-year orbit. Now, the long duration of the new work allowed experts to remove any possible seasonal variability.
Leigh Fletcher, a co-author of the study, said in a NASA press release that measuring the temperature changes and periods over time in Jupiter's atmosphere was a step forward in having a Jupiter weather forecast. They added that the even bigger-picture question was whether they could someday extend this to other giant planets to determine if similar patterns show up.
Researchers found a mysterious connection between temperature shifts in regions thousands of miles apart. When temperatures increased at specific latitudes in the northern hemisphere, temperatures at the same latitudes in the southern hemisphere went down.
Fletcher said that the next objective would be to understand what is driving these mysterious patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales. They noted that researchers would need to explore both above and below the cloudy layers in order to determine the root cause of the processes, SciTechDaily reported.
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