PASADENA, Calif., March 16 (UPI) -- NASA says new thermal images from powerful Earth-based telescopes have produced the first detailed interior map of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
The space agency says the images show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within the Great Red Spot, revealing the reddest color corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system. NASA said the data give astronomers and other scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system's best-known storm system.
"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system," said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."
Space agency scientists said the spot -- a cold region averaging about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit -- is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.
The thermal images were obtained by three giant 26-foot telescopes -- the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
The research appears in the journal Icarus.
