SPACE-COSMOS

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Acting Very Strangely, Puzzling Scientists

Noor Al-Sibai
Thu, October 10, 2024 


Great Ball of Fire

Jupiter's Giant Red Spot (GRS) is large enough to swallow the entire Earth — and as new imagery from Hubble suggests, it's a lot weirder than previously thought.

Between December 2023 and March 2024, the Hubble Space Telescope took a closer look at the massive and mysterious "anticyclone" that has long fascinated astronomers and found that not only does its size keep changing, but that it appears to be, well, jiggling.

"While we knew its motion varies slightly in its longitude, we didn’t expect to see the size oscillate," explained NASA's Amy Simon, a director at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. "As far as we know, it’s not been identified before."

This ginormous storm is, as NASA points out, the largest in our Solar System. In 1979, the Voyager spacecraft clocked its diameter at a whopping 14,500 miles across — but per more recent Hubble observations, it's shrunken to a mere 10,250 miles.

With these latest Hubble images taken over 90 days, the GRS seems to be behaving like a stress ball. The white clouds around it even sort of resemble a squeezing hand — an incredible coincidence that drives home how fascinating this finding really is.

[video src="https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/hubble-grs-2023-2024-stsci-01j948e7p897jnszr4gqd1pjq3.mp4" /]

Proper Look

Simon noted that despite having been observed by astronomers for centuries, the GRS had never been repeatedly imaged over time before this three-month dedicated look.

"With Hubble’s high resolution," she said, "we can say that the GRS is definitively squeezing in and out at the same time as it moves faster and slower."

"That was very unexpected, and at present, there are no hydrodynamic explanations," she added.

Simon and her team's findings could have implications for studying hurricanes on Earth as well.

"As it accelerates and decelerates, the GRS is pushing against the windy jet streams to the north and south of it," explained Mike Wong, co-investigator of the new research from the University of California at Berkeley, in the agency's statement. "It's similar to a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to bulge out when there's too much filling in the middle."

As of now, the team is still investigating possible explanations for the spot's strange behavior — but we can be sure Simon's team will be looking at the eye-shaped spot even closer now that they know how weird it is.

More on the GRS: James Webb Observes Mysterious Structures Above Jupiter's Great Red Spot


Past life on Mars? Here's what new NASA evidence points to.

Mashable
Wed, October 9, 2024 


NASA's Curiosity rover takes in a desolate view of Mars at Gale crater in 2021.


Cold, dry, and barren: Mars doesn't look like it could be a haven for life — at least not the kind humans are familiar with.

Despite the Red Planet's appearance, scientists have wondered for decades about the possibility of microbial life inhabiting Mars in the distant past. Now a new study, based on data collected by NASA's Curiosity rover, is peeling back another layer of the mystery. For the first time, researchers measured the isotopic composition of carbon-rich minerals found in Gale Crater, a region laced with dried rivers and gullies and being explored by the rover.

The findings Curiosity beamed millions of miles back to Earth were not optimistic, at least in terms of the potential for life above ground.

"Our samples are not consistent with an ancient environment with life (biosphere) on the surface of Mars," said David Burtt, lead author of the study, in a statement, "although this does not rule out the possibility of an underground biosphere or a surface biosphere that began and ended before these carbonates formed."

The new paper, published in the National Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, suggests two possible ways carbon-rich minerals could have formed at Gale crater: a series of alternating wet and dry periods at the site or salty-ice conditions. These two different ancient climate scenarios could be summed up as bleak and bleaker when it comes to supporting life.

SEE ALSO: NASA's Mars rovers had a gangbusters summer of rocks

Curiosity snapping a selfie on Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover snaps a selfie image on lower Mount Sharp in Gale crater in August 2015. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

In an environment that swings like a pendulum from wet to dry, the region would intermittently shift from more habitable to less habitable, said Jennifer Stern, a co-author. In frigid temperatures near the planet's equator, the environment would be hostile for living things because most water would be frozen and inaccessible for chemistry or biology.

"And what is there is extremely salty and unpleasant for life," she added in a statement.

This isn't the first time scientists have theorized these possible climate scenarios for ancient Mars. Computer modeling of the planet, based on the presence of certain minerals and rock formations, have led scientists down this path before, but this is the first time they've had isotopic evidence from Martian rocks to bolster those ideas.

Imagining ancient Mars

An artist interprets what Gale crater on Mars might have looked like during one of its ancient, wet periods. Credit: NASA illustration

Scientists have sought life on Mars since the first spacecraft touched down on its surface in 1976. Mounting evidence from robotic explorers, especially from Curiosity and its twin Perseverance, has shown the Red Planet to have once been warmer and wetter, perhaps more than 3 billion years ago.

The rover pair had a highly productive summer, including Perseverance's discovery of a spotted rock with the most compelling signs of ancient dead Martian life yet, though a sample would need to be shipped back to Earth for confirmation. A research team also recently published more evidence of a vast ocean of water below the planet’s surface. And where there's water on Earth, there's often life.

Scientists are interested in Mars' carbon-rich rocks because they are like climate time capsules. Their minerals can hold onto clues about the environments in which they formed, such as the temperature and acidity of the water, and the ingredients within the water and air. Curiosity made the isotope measurements by heating the samples to over 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit and analyzing the released gasses.


Isotopes are versions of an element with different masses. As water evaporates, light versions of carbon and oxygen are more likely to escape into the atmosphere, while heavier versions tend to remain and get incorporated into rocks.

The isotope values of the sampled materials indicate lots of evaporation, the team says, suggesting that they probably formed in a climate that could only support transient liquid water — that is, water that comes from melted ice when temperatures rise and the surface pressure is right.

The heavy isotope values in the samples are much higher than what’s seen on Earth for carbonate minerals. Furthermore, they are the heaviest carbon and oxygen isotope values recorded for any Martian materials. Although evaporation can cause oxygen isotope changes on Earth, the changes measured in the Martian samples were two to three times greater, Burtt said.

Orbiter looking down at a Martian cave

Astrobiologists believe caves like this one on Mars could potentially harbor life. Credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona

"The fact that these carbon and oxygen isotope values are higher than anything else measured on Earth or Mars points towards a process (or processes) being taken to an extreme," he said.

But this doesn't discount the possibility of life. The Red Planet appears to have a network of deep caves formed by ancient volcanic vents. Within them could be liquid water, traces of long-deceased bacteria or fungi, or, some scientists believe, perhaps even existing microbial life.

Caves can host complex ecosystems, inhabited by extremophiles that munch on rocks and convert the material into energy for life. Because of this, many astrobiologists want nothing more than to go spelunking on Mars.

This dazzling NASA image shows the biggest super star cluster in our galaxy

Westerlund 1 is a young cluster of stars up to 100,000 times bigger than our sun.

Mariella Moon
·Contributing Reporter
Thu, October 10, 2024 

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Zamani


The James Webb Space Telescope continues to capture images of space that are clearer and more detailed than what we've seen before. One of the latest images it has taken is of a "super star cluster" called Westerlund 1, and it shows an abundant collection of heavenly bodies, shining brightly like gemstones. Super star clusters are young clusters of stars thousands of times bigger than our sun that are all packed in a small area. Our galaxy used to produce more clusters billions of years ago, but it doesn't churn out as many stars anymore, and only a few super star clusters still exist in the Milky Way.

Westerlund 1 is the biggest remaining super star cluster in our galaxy, and it's also the closest to our planet. It's located 12,000 light-years away, made up of massive stars between 50,000 and 100,000 times the mass of our sun within a region that measures six light-years across. Those stars include yellow hypergiants that are around a million times brighter than our sun, as well. Since the stars populating the cluster have a comparatively short life, scientists believe it's only around 3.5 to 5 million years old. That's pretty young in the cosmic scale. As such, it's a valuable source of data that could help us better understand how massive stars form and eventually die. We won't be around to see it, but the cluster is expected to produce 1,500 supernovae in less than 40 million years.


Astronomers captured an image of the super star cluster as part of an ongoing survey of Westerlund 1 and another cluster called Westerlund 2 to study star formation and evolution. To take the image, they used Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), which was also recently used to capture a gravitationally lensed supernova that could help shed light on how fast our universe is expanding.