The Endless Storm Over Jupiter
Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, has been probing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—a huge, untiring hurricane that takes six days to fully rotate—since the late 1970s, when Voyager 1 began to send up-close images of Jupiter back to Earth.
At the time, Marcus was at Cornell, and when he needed to, as he put it, “unwind, relax, whatever,” he would walk over to a special library, next to the astrophysics building, and marvel at Voyager’s pictures. The storm had raged hundreds of millions of miles away since at least 1665, when it was first observed by Robert Hooke. “I realized that almost nobody in astronomy was trained in fluid dynamics, and I was,” he told me. “And I said, well, I’m in as good a position as anybody to start studying this.”
At the end of this month in Seattle, at the annual conference of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, Marcus will address repeated reports that the Great Red Spot is dying. Observations since last spring, of the storm shedding red clouds, seem to indicate its demise. Marcus isn’t convinced. As he told Nautilus recently, “The Spot is not dying.”
What do you find fascinating about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot?
Several things. People have long wondered, why has the Great Red Spot been around for such a long time? The
