Original photo by NASA Image Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
Earth’s moon has its craters, Saturn has its rings, and Jupiter has its Great Red Spot. Far more than a cosmetic anomaly, the planet’s most distinctive feature is actually a storm that’s bigger than Earth. The ever-swirling vortex is thought to have been raging for at least 300 years, but up until recently little was known about it. Our knowledge of the 10,000-mile-wide storm expanded around late 2021, after NASA’s Juno mission passed over it twice. According to Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis, the Great Red Spot is “basically clouds” and “not all that dissimilar to the kinds of things we know as cyclones or hurricanes or typhoons on Earth” — just, you know, infinitely larger, older, and more cosmically terrifying.
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It's a factWhen it comes to our solar system, Jupiter lives up to its “gas giant” title — it’s more than twice as massive as every other planet combined, and 318 times more massive than Earth.
The winds of this particular storm reach 400 miles per hour. No one’s entirely sure why it’s red, although one theory suggests that the color has to do with chemicals being shattered apart by sunlight in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Making the solar system’s largest storm slightly less imposing — but no less fascinating — is the fact that it’s shrinking at a rate of about 580 miles per year. That adds up quite a bit: The Great Red Spot was closer to 30,000 miles long in the late 19th century (nearly three times its current size), and some believe it could vanish entirely within 20 years.
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Jupiter was named after the Roman equivalent of ______.
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Jupiter was named after the Roman equivalent of Zeus.
Jupiter also has rings.
When most of us think of ringed planets, Saturn comes to mind first. But Saturn isn’t the only planet in our solar system with rings: Jupiter has them too, as do fellow gas giants Neptune and Uranus. Relatively faint and composed primarily of dust, the Jovian rings have three main elements: the halo, main ring, and gossamer rings (of which there are two). The halo is wide, doughnut-shaped, and closest to the planet itself. The main ring, which is brighter and thinner, is where the moons Adrastea and Metis orbit; the dust it’s made up of is thought to have been ejected from those two small natural satellites. Then there are the extremely faint, wide gossamer rings, which extend beyond the orbit of moon Amalthea. Jupiter’s rings and moons were recently captured in infrared by the James Webb Space Telescope, offering one of the most stunning views of them yet.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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