The equivalent of the Earth's 12-year hot and cold cycle! Who "directed" Jupiter's magical "mirror climate"?

40 years of research confirms Jupiter's anomaly

An infrared image of Jupiter taken in 2016, with blue representing cooler areas and orange representing warmer areas.

(Image credit: ESO/LN Fletcher)

New research has detected unusual phenomena on Jupiter.

Four decades of measurements of Jupiter's atmosphere by spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have revealed strange weather patterns on the largest planet in our solar system, with hot and cold cycles in its long year (equivalent to 12 Earth years). But Jupiter does not experience seasons like Earth does.

Earth's seasons are caused by the tilt of its axis as it orbits the sun. This tilt causes different places on Earth to receive different levels of sunlight throughout the year. But Jupiter's axis is tilted just 3 degrees toward the giant planet's orbital plane, meaning that over the course of a long year, the amount of sunlight reaching different parts of Jupiter's surface barely changes. And new research has found that temperatures around cloud-covered Jupiter change periodically.

"We have now solved one piece of the puzzle: Jupiter's atmospheric variations reveal natural cycles in its climate," Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and co-author of the new paper, said in a NASA statement. "We need to probe both above and below the cloud layers to explore what influences the climate's changes and why they occur at these particular times."

The team found that these unseasonal seasons may be linked to a phenomenon called teleconnections, in which periodic climate changes occur simultaneously in seemingly unrelated regions of a planet thousands of miles apart.

Teleconnections have been observed in Earth's atmosphere since the 19th century, most notably during the famous La Niña-El Niño cycle, also known as the Southern Oscillation, when changes in trade winds in the western Pacific coincide with changes in rainfall over much of North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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A new study finds that when the temperature at a specific latitude in Jupiter's northern hemisphere rises, the temperature at the same latitude in the southern hemisphere drops, like a perfect mirror image.

"This is a very exciting time for us," said Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and lead author of the study.

"It's really amazing that even very distant latitudes show a link in temperature changes. This is very similar to a phenomenon we see on Earth, where weather and climate patterns in one region can have a noticeable effect on weather elsewhere, and the patterns of change appear to be 'teleconnected' across large distances through the atmosphere."

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And we found that as temperatures rise, the stratosphere (the upper layer of Jupiter's atmosphere) drops down to the troposphere (the lowest layer of Jupiter's atmosphere), where some weather events occur, including Jupiter's intense storms.

The study drew on data from some of the best ground-based telescopes since 1978, including the Very Large Telescope in Chile, NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility and the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. The researchers also used data from space collected by the deep space probes Voyager, which flew by Jupiter in 1979, and Cassini, which flew by Jupiter and explored Saturn in 2001.

"Our ability to measure temperature variations and time periods and relate these data to cause and effect in Jupiter's atmosphere is an important step toward a comprehensive weather forecast for Jupiter, and we can even extend this research to other giant planets to see if similar phenomena occur elsewhere," Fletcher said in the statement.

Previously, scientists knew that Jupiter's atmospheric features were identified based on color: cooler areas appeared as lighter colors, while warmer areas appeared as brown bands. The new study, which spanned three Jovian years, is the first to reveal how this climate pattern changes over long periods of time.

The research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Related knowledge

Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only place in the Universe known to harbor life. While there is abundant water throughout the Solar System, only Earth has liquid water. About 71% of Earth's surface is made up of ocean, dwarfing the planet's polar regions of ice, lakes, and rivers. 29% of Earth's surface is land, made up of continents and islands. Earth's surface is made up of several slowly moving tectonic plates, the interactions of which produce phenomena such as mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates a magnetic field that shapes Earth's magnetosphere, deflecting the destructive solar wind.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet in the Solar System. Jupiter is a gas giant with a mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but less than one thousandth of the mass of the Sun. Jupiter is the third brightest natural object in the Earth's night sky observed since prehistoric times, after the Moon and Venus. It is named after Jupiter, the chief god of the ancient Roman religion.

BY: Tereza Pultarova

FY: Aaaaaz

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