At a Glance

NASA's spacecraft Juno captured spectacular images of amassive cyclones on Jupiter's north and south poles.The cyclones are arranged in bizarre, geometrical configurations and are "unlike anything else encountered in our solar system,"NASA said. All of them stretch several thousand miles in diameter andare packing winds of up to 220 mph.

Spectacular images captured by the Juno spacecraft of amassive cyclonesurrounded by eight smaller cyclones swirling on Jupiter's north pole and six similar cyclones on the planet'ssouth pole were released this week by NASA.

The cyclones arranged in bizarre, geometrical configurations are "unlike anything else encountered in our solar system,"in a press release.

All of them stretch , which far surpasses the 157 mph winds necessary fora Category 5 hurricane rating, according toresearch published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Prior to Juno, we did not know what the weather was like near Jupiter’s poles. Now, we have been able to observe the polar weather up-close every two months,” said Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome, and lead author of the paper.

Adriani said each of the northern cyclones is nearly as wide as the distance between Naples, Italy, and New York City, while the southern ones are even larger than that.

This computer-generated image shows the structure of the cyclonic pattern observed over Jupiter’s south pole. Like in the North, Jupiter’s south pole also contains a central cyclone, but it is surrounded by five cyclones with diameters ranging from 3,500 to 4,300 miles in diameter.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)

"They have very violent winds, reaching, in some cases, speeds as great as 220 mph," Adriani said. "Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, they are very close together and enduring. There is nothing else like it that we know of in the solar system.”

NASA noted that the data collected by Juno since it began orbiting the gas giant in 2016 indicates that the "atmospheric winds of the gas-giant planet run deep into its atmosphere and last longer than similar atmospheric processes found here on Earth."

The scientists also reportedthatJupiter’s crisscrossing east-west jet streams penetrate thousands of miles beneath the clouds, indicating that "the weather layer of Jupiter was more massive, extending much deeper than previously expected."

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Yohai Kaspi, Juno co-investigator from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, noted in a press release that "the Jovian weather layer, from its very top to a depth of 1,900 miles, contains about one percent of Jupiter’s mass."

“By contrast, Earth’s atmosphere is less than one-millionth of the total mass of Earth,” said Kaspi “The fact that Jupiter has such a massive region rotating in separate east-west bands is definitely a surprise.”

The mission to study Jupiter's origins, structure and atmosphere began when the unmanned spacecraft departed Earth in 2011 and traveled 1.7 billion miles through the solar system to reach the gas giant.The mission is scheduled to end in July when the probe takes its final plunge into the planet's surface.