Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has company. Meet the Great Cold Spot
Aurora may fuel colder mark in planet’s northern atmosphere

SPOTTED Jupiter’s northern aurora, shown in this Hubble Space Telescope image, may help generate the newly detected “Great Cold Spot” in the planet’s atmosphere.
J. Nichols/University of Leicester, NASA, ESA
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.
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“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.”
Stallard and colleagues got their first clue that the Great Cold Spot existed when they used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to study an ion of hydrogen in Jupiter’s atmosphere. While mapping the atmosphere’s temperature and density, the team discovered a region about 73 degrees Celsius cooler than the gas around it. Comparing the data with observations from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii revealed that the dark mark had actually been seen in the same location for more than 15 years.

“To see weather in this region of the atmosphere is weird,” says Planetary Science Institute researcher Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who is based in Maine. Researchers thought the temperature contrasts caused by the aurora would get smoothed out quickly, he says, so finding such a long-lived vortex in the upper layers of the atmosphere is unexpected.