As you gaze upon these images of swirling clouds on Jupiter, do you see vortices? This is the question posed by the Jovian Vortex Hunter citizen science project, which invites participants to examine Juno spacecraft images of Jupiter’s mesmerizing clouds. This project aims to advance our understanding of how Jovian vortices like the famous Great Red Spot form and evolve over time. Recently, Ramanakumar Sankar (University of California, Berkeley) and collaborators presented the project’s first results, which were drawn from more than a million classifications made by roughly 5,000 participants. The volunteers identified, located, and described 7,000 vortices, and their annotations led to some surprising findings, including an apparent correlation between the color of the vortex — related to its chemistry — and its size and location. For example, white or brown vortices seem to be larger than red or cloud-free vortices, and while white and cloud-free vortices tend to linger near the poles and brown vortices span moderate latitudes, red vortices crop up in specific latitude bands. To learn more about the results of this citizen study, and to see what the team plans to do next, be sure to check out the full research article linked below.
Citation
“Jovian Vortex Hunter: A Citizen Science Project to Study Jupiter’s Vortices,” Ramanakumar Sankar et al 2024 Planet. Sci. J. 5 203. doi:10.3847/PSJ/ad6e75