Colourful Cyclones at Jupiter’s North Pole

Colourful Cyclones at Jupiter’s North Pole

NASA’s Juno mission has captured cyclones at the north pole of Jupiter that appear as swirls of striking colours in the extreme false colour rendering of an image. The huge, persistent cyclone found at Jupiter’s north-pole is visible at the center of the image, encircled by smaller cyclones that range in size from 4,000 to 4,600 kilometres. The total area covered by these storms on Jupiter is much larger than our entire planet Earth.

The colours in the image reveal a lot about Jupiter and the subtle details present in Jupiter’s dynamic cloud structure.

The Juno mission provided the first clear views of Jupiter’s polar-regions. Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument has also mapped this area, as well as a similar pattern of storms at the planet’s south-pole.

The greatly exaggerated colour in the image is partially a result of combining many individual images to create this view by Citizen Scientist Gerald Eichstädt.