Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has company. Meet the Great Cold Spot
Aurora may fuel colder mark in planet’s northern atmosphere
By
Ashley Yeager
12:00pm, April 12, 2017
Jupiter’s got a second giant spot.
Called the Great Cold Spot, this dark mark is twice as big as Earth, but cooler and more fickle than the planet’s famous (and similarly sized) Great Red Spot. The cool spot sits in Jupiter’s northern regions, not far from the stunning northern aurora in the planet’s atmosphere. The aurora may play a role in creating the newly detected dark mark, researchers report online April 10 in Geophysical Research Letters.
“We can’t be exactly sure how the spot forms,” says study coauthor Tom Stallard, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England. “But we are sure it is there because we observed it numerous times.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/jupiters-great-red-spot-has-company-meet-great-cold-spot
