Boston University | Royal Astronomical Society | 2016 July 27
[c][attachment=0]Jupiter_GRS.jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]Researchers from Boston University’s (BU) Center for Space Physics report today in Nature that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot may provide the mysterious source of energy required to heat the planet’s upper atmosphere to the unusually high values observed.
Sunlight reaching Earth efficiently heats the terrestrial atmosphere at altitudes well above the surface–even at 250 miles high, for example, where the International Space Station orbits. Jupiter is over five times more distant from the Sun, and yet its upper atmosphere has temperatures, on average, comparable to those found at Earth. The sources of the non-solar energy responsible for this extra heating have remained elusive to scientists studying processes in the outer solar system. ...
Astronomers measure the temperature of a planet by observing the non-visible, infrared (IR) light it emits. The visible cloud tops we see at Jupiter are about 30 miles above its rim; the IR emissions used by the BU team came from heights about 500 miles higher. When the BU observers looked at their results, they found high altitude temperatures much larger than anticipated whenever their telescope looked at certain latitudes and longitudes in the planet’s southern hemi-sphere. ...
Heating of Jupiter’s Upper Atmosphere above the Great Red Spot - J. O’Donoghue et al
- Nature (online 27 July 2016) DOI: 10.1038/nature18940