New Measurements Of Jupiter's Equatorial Region In Visible Wavelengths

Details New Measurements Of Jupiter's Equatorial Region In Visible Wavelengths New Measurements Of Jupiter's Equatorial Region In Visible Wavelengths

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.1104r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #11.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1017

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We have studied the equatorial region of Jupiter, between 15ºS and 15ºN, on Cassini ISS images obtained during the Jupiter flyby at the end of 2000 and on HST images acquired in May and July 2008. We have found significant longitudinal variations in the intensity of the 6ºN eastward jet, up to 60 m s-1 in Cassini and HST observations. In the HST case we found that these longitudinal variations are associated to different cloud morphology.
Photometric and radiative transfer analysis of the cloud features used as tracers in HST images shows that there is only a small height difference, no larger than 0.5 - 1 scale heights at most, between the slow ( 100 m s-1) and fast ( 150 m s-1) moving features. This suggests that speed variability at 6ºN is not dominated by vertical wind shears and we propose that Rossby wave activity is the responsible for the zonal variability. After removing this variability we found that Jupiter's equatorial jet is actually symmetric relative to the equator with two peaks of 140 - 150 m s-1 located at latitudes 6ºN and 6ºS and at a similar pressure level.
We also studied a large, long-lived feature called the White Spot (WS) located at 6ºS that turns to form and desapear. The internal flow field in the White Spot indicates that it is a weakly rotating quasi-equatorial anticyclone relative to the ambient meridionally sheared flow.
Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Spanish MICIIN AYA2009-10701 with FEDER and Grupos Gobierno Vasco IT-464-07.

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