While some research seems to require every possible research tool, others can be done with just one telescope and a whole lot of time. When Hubble first launched, I didn’t have my driver’s license, and fashion was actually identical to what is popular now, but the hairstyles were much bigger. It took a few years and a servicing mission to get Hubble up and running with peak performance, and over the past many decades since then, Hubble has been able to track the changes of various objects around the universe, including objects not too far from home. One of those objects is Jupiter. 

Since its final servicing mission in 2009, Hubble has been tracking the speed of winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. In a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters led by M H Wong, researchers show that the outer winds in this seemingly eternal hurricane have been speeding up. While this storm has been there since at least Galileo first looked at Jupiter through a telescope in the early 1600s, the storm hasn’t been unchanging. 

In recent decades, we’ve seen the spot’s color change, and for the past 150 years, it has been gradually shrinking. We don’t understand the forces that drive and change this storm, and now we have one more change to try and understand. It turns out that predicting storms is one of the hardest things we can do both here on Earth and out on other worlds across our solar system.

More Information

ESA Hubble press release

Hubble press release

“Evolution of the Horizontal Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot From One Jovian Year of HST/WFC3 Maps,” Michael H. Wong et al., 2021 August 29, Geophysical Research Letters