With tumultuous winds peaking at about 400 mph (640 km/h), the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for the past 150 years — maybe even longer. While people saw a big spot in Jupiter as early as they started stargazing through telescopes in the 1600s, it is still unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the …show more content…
Goddard scientists Mark Loeffler and Reggie Hudson have been performing laboratory studies to investigate whether cosmic rays, one type of radiation that strikes Jupiter’s clouds, can chemically alter ammonium hydrosulfide to produce new compounds that could explain the spot’s color.
Ammonium hydrosulfide is unstable under Earth’s atmospheric conditions, so Loeffler makes his own batch by heating hydrogen sulfide and ammonia together. He then blasts them with charged particles, similar to the cosmic rays impacting Jupiter’s clouds. “Our first step is to try to identify what forms when ammonium hydrosulfide is irradiated,” Loeffler said. “We have recently finished identifying these new products, and now we are trying to correlate what we have learned with the colors in Jupiter.”
Other experts agree with the leading theory that deep under Jupiter’s clouds a colorless ammonium hydrosulfide layer could be reacting with cosmic rays or UV radiation from the Sun. But Simon said many chemicals turn red under different situations. “That’s the problem,” she said. “Is it turning the right color red?” Under the right conditions, ammonium hydrosulfide might