JUPITER STRIPES

For: Mains

Topics covered: About Jupiter’s Stripe

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News Flash

New research shows that Jupiter’s stripes, caused by the planet’s zonal winds (alternating east-west jet streams), only descend to 3,000 kilometers in the atmosphere.

The team looked to the NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter that revealed how far zonal winds around Jupiter descend — to a depth about 4 percent of Jupiter’s radius.

 

Why Jupiter’s stripes are only skin deep?

Magnetic fields can make fluids that conduct electricity (like Jupiter’s atmosphere) behave more like honey than water. Deeper into the planet, where the pressure is higher, the atmosphere becomes more conducting and is more strongly influenced by the planetary magnetic field. It’s also the same place where the stripes stop.

The magnetically enhanced viscosity could be strong enough to be the culprit that terminates the winds at depths below 3,000 km.

An electrically conducting, flowing fluid will bend or distort a magnetic field. It is also found that the distortion of the magnetic field reacts back on the fluid in a way that effectively makes the fluid more viscous.

 

Highlights

• The stripes of colour on Jupiter are called its bands.
• There are two types of bands on Jupiter. The light-coloured bands are called ‘zones’ and show regions where the gas is rising. The dark-coloured bands are called ‘belts’ and show where gas is sinking.

 

Causes of Jupiter’s stripes

Jupiter’s stripes or ‘bands’ are caused by differences in the chemical composition and temperature of the atmospheric gas.

It used to be thought that the only cause for these bands was the strong atmospheric winds coupled with strong convection cells circulating material between different layers of the atmosphere. However, it is now thought that Jupiter’s moons also play an important role in making Jupiter stripy by tugging on the planet’s atmospheric convection cells.

 

Source: Physics Organization

 

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