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Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking and there's something odd inside of it

The Hubble Space Telescope captures stunning new photos of the solar system's outer planets each year to help scientists keep track of any changes.

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This year, the Hubble team compiled Jupiter's images into a 4K video (below). The images have helped researchers calculate the wind speeds on the gas giant and study its gaseous bands — but they've also revealed a never-before-seen feature at the very center of the Great Red Spot.

jupiter red spot
Jupiter's giant red spot is similar to hurricane on Earth, but it's been raging for 400 years. YouTube/NASA

Jupiter's Red Spot is similar to a hurricane but is about three times the size of Earth. The storm has raged nonstop for at least 300 years yet is shrinking day by day. The new images, for example, show the giant storm shrunk 150 miles since 2014.

But scientists found something strange and new in the photos: A "wispy filament" that spans almost the entire length of the spot, according to a NASA press release.

During the rotation video, it gets buffeted around by Jupiter's 330-mph winds. You can make out the filament spinning counterclockwise in the red and blue boxes in the animation below:

So what is this filament, and what might it mean for the Great Red Spot's future? NASA's release doesn't say, and neither does a new study about the Hubble images in the journal Astrophysical Letters.

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But Amy Simon, an astronomer at NASA and lead author of the study, said it's a cloud band that may have popped up as a result of the giant spot's shrinking.

"[T]he stagnant region in the middle has gotten smaller over the years, so that may be affecting the region of high velocity winds that circulate around the interior of the Red Spot," she told Tech Insider by email. "Once we know if the speeds have changed, we’ll know more [about] what this cloud band really means!"

In addition to the filament, researchers also spotted a very rare wave of swirling cyclones near the planet's equator. The vertical lines in the image below point to the wave, while the white arrows point to cyclones forming at the top of the wave.

jupiter wave
NASA

The wave is similar to baroclinic waves on Earth, which form in our home planet's atmosphere and help produce cyclonic storms.

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We've seen this kind of wave on Jupiter only once before: when NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet decades ago.

"Until now, we thought the wave seen by Voyager 2 might have been a fluke," Glenn Orton, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in the release. "As it turns out, it's just rare!"

Here's the complete rotation video of Jupiter:

NASA Space
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