Jupiter
A magnetic blemish on Jupiter is being investigated
The mysterious workings of Jupiter’s intense magnetic field are coming to light thanks to a tiny jet buried deep in the gas giant’s T atmosphere. Every four years, this jet appears to fluctuate like a wave. While it’s not yet clear what drives this atmospheric jet, new findings reveal some clues about the invisible complex workings of an intense area of magnetism near Jupiter’s equator, dubbed the ‘Great Blue Spot’. This region isn’t actually blue – the name comes from the colour scale scientists use to build maps of Jupiter’s magnetic field.
Unlike Earth’s magnetic field, the gas giant’s field isn’t symmetric with its rotational axis. This asymmetry is so pronounced, in fact, that the Great Blue Spot can even be likened to a second south pole poking out from the planet’s equator. It also appears that part of the region is getting swept westward by one jet while other parts are being tugged at by winds flowing eastward. “It’s a mystery,” Yohai Kaspi, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a co-investigator of NASA’s Juno mission, said “We don’t know why that place has that kind of an anomaly.”
In a paper published 6 March in Nature, scientists may have offered some more insight into the Great Blue Spot. They used data sent home from the Juno probe that’s presently investigating Jupiter, as it had mapped the Great Blue Spot during a series of targeted flybys conducted during its extended mission. Much like ocean waves that change their speed as they move, the new finding suggests there may be wavelike behaviour deep inside Jupiter’s metallic core that could power the observed magnetic field, study lead au
