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The "Evil Eye" of Jupiter stands out clearly against the rest of the giant planet.
Vast, oval-shaped red marking with its "wake" of counter-rotating vortices has puzzled astronomers for at least a century.
It's an extremely complicated feature, considered by many to be a permanent characteristic on the surface of either the solid body of
Jupiter or a solid shell comparable to the mantle of the Earth, surrounding a fluid core.
Jupiter's enormous frozen mass, most probably frozen gases, lies under a cloud cover consisting almost entirely of substances which
preclude the possibility of life - at least of life as we humans, know it.
Even in a very modest telescope it is visible as a disc with faint markings across it.
On nights when the air is clear and still it's possible to observe a spectacular phenomenon unseen anywhere else in the system - the Red Spot of Jupiter, the "Evil Eye".
The darkest red part of the spot turns out to be a warm patch inside the otherwise cold storm but the temperature variation is insignificant.
"Warm" means -250 degrees Fahrenheit (°F) while cold is -256 degrees F. Scientists do not know yet, what this difference really means.
The Great Red Spot near Jupiter's icy equator covers an area of approximately two hundred million square miles!
We can say that if the estimation is correct, it means that this single red feature on Jupiter is larger than all the continents on our planet combined!
North is at the top and the distance from top to bottom is about 24,000 km.
Note the puffy features inside the GRS, and the "reverse-S" spirals inside both the GRS and the oval.
The large white feature extending over the northern part of the GRS was
observed to revolve about the GRS center with a period of 6 days. Credits: Voyager 1-98/NASA/JPL
What does that bright red spot consist of?
Is it some kind of substance that has coagulated?
Or is it some strange extraterrestrial life-form thriving in Jupiter's bizarre atmosphere?
Commonly accepted theory is that the Red Spot it is a vast storm, spinning like a cyclone and rotating counterclockwise direction.
Observations of the behavior of the Jovian phenomenon from 1891 until 1957/58, showed its rotation periods and apparition has varied unexpectedly.
Strange Jupiter sounds as recorded by NASA's Voyager
B.M. Peek, a well-known amateur astronomer who served as President of the British Astronomical Association and on the Council of
The Royal Astronomical Society, at that time, investigated the strange behavior of Jupiter's Red Spot.
"It is difficult to resist the conclusion that some physical influence, which had been responsible for the correlation from 1891
onwards, ceased somewhat abruptly to operate about the year 1930…" Peek said.
Very similar changes were also recorded regarding the darkness and acceleration of the feature. Also, the clouds of the GRS have
been vanishing.
It is possible that one day it will disappear forever.
What does manipulate the Red Spot?
Is it Jupiter's frigid atmosphere responsible for all varieties in its behavior? Or is something in Jupiter's sky responsible?
Why is the area in the center of the spot quiet, all the time?
Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA'S Jet Propulsion Laboratory investigates planetary atmospheres.
He says that since the 1870s, scientists have been studying the complexity of the GRS.
Now they begin to understand the weather patterns around the Great Red Spot, but not inside the mysterious feature.
The newest observations of the motion of the storm, conducted by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley,
showed that the feature shrank approximately 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) a day and lost 15 percent of its diameter between 1996 and 2006.
"We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."
"This is the first time we can say that there's an intimate link between environmental conditions - temperature, winds,
pressure and composition - and the actual color of the Great Red Spot," Orton's collaborator, Leigh Fletcher, an Oxford astronomer added.
"Although we can speculate, we still don't know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color,
but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm."
The enormous red, oval phenomenon remains fixed toward Earth, looking at us like an evil eye.
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