The planet Jupiter has lost one of its major belts, leaving behind a seemingly empty area. It is estimated that light clouds cover the strip made up of lower clouds, this process happened several times and within a few months Jupiter returned to normal
Jupiter stands out in the sky thanks to two dark bands in its atmosphere - one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. But a picture taken by the amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley (the same astronomer who discovered the impact spot on Jupiter about a year ago) on May 9, 2010 shows Jupiter relatively naked without the southern strip known as the southern equatorial belt, which has disappeared.
אתר Universe Today It is said that the strip was visible at the end of 2009, before Jupiter got too close to the Sun as seen from Earth. When the planet appeared outside the Sun's glow in early April, no trace of the southern equatorial belt was found.
This is not the first time that Jupiter's southern equatorial belt has disappeared. It disappeared in 1973 when the Pioneer 10 spacecraft took the first close-up photographs of the planet and also disappeared temporarily in the early XNUMXs.
New Scientist website The theory is that the bands may appear dark simply because high-altitude cirrus clouds common in other regions of Jupiter are missing, revealing dark clouds beneath them, says Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We are looking at different layers in the cloud structure of the planet."
The disappearance of the belt comes at a time when extensive and mysterious changes are taking place on Jupiter, and among other things, the colors of other bands change as well as the colors of the spots in the atmosphere.
One response
Very nice. shows that there is a very active and dynamic atmosphere there. The question is why did the belt disappear? And what causes this?