Explanation: What's that black spot on Jupiter? No one is sure. During one pass of NASA's Juno over Jupiter, the robotic spacecraft imaged an usually dark cloud feature informally dubbed the Abyss. Surrounding cloud patterns show the Abyss to be at the center of a vortex. Since dark features on Jupiter's atmosphere tend to run deeper than light features, the Abyss may really be the deep hole that it appears -- but without more evidence that remains conjecture. The Abyss is surrounded by a complex of meandering clouds and other swirlingstorm systems, some of which are topped by light colored, high-altitude clouds. The featured image was captured in 2019 while Juno passed only about 15,000 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops. The next close pass of Juno near Jupiter will be in about three weeks.
However, the most impressive pit in today's APOD is the amazing Saltstraumen vortex here on Earth, seen in a video that today's caption has a link to:
Saltstraumen vortex, the deepest hole in the ocean!
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
I remember reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne when I was a kid, and its ambiguous hero, Captain Nemo, was caught in another vortex, the Moskstraumen, also off the coast of Norway. In the novel, Captain Nemo apparently died as he was relentlessly sucked into the vortex's immeasurable depth - well, its depth seemed immeasurable to me - and I shuddered. Shudder!
But Jules Verne's editor was apparently unhappy about the main character's grisly end in a family-friendly novel, so he had Verne resurrect the character again. Well, if Sherlock Holmes could survive falling into the Reichenbach Falls, when his creator Arthur Conan Doyle needed more money and was too besieged by angry Sherlock Holmes fans, I guess it wouldn't be too hard for Jules Verne to make Captain Nemo to escape the clutches of the Moskstraumen vortex.
Well, back to the APOD. I have nothing to say about the "dark hole" of Jupiter, but if that thing is indeed a local abyss, then Jupiter's cloud cover has its heights, too. Most famous of these is of course the Great Red Spot, 8 kilometers or 5 miles above sea level - eh, I mean, 8 kilometers or 5 miles above the surrounding cloud cover.
The elevation of the Great Red Spot above the cloud cover of Jupiter is not quite as high as Mount Everest. But, you know, give or take?
But then they admit that it must be at least 178 meters deep (I understand the estimate came from the fact that From day to night, temperatures of the circular features change only about one-third as much as the change in temperature of surrounding ground.)
So no limit to this cave be much deeper, and having a warmer and thermally stable bottom. Flying Martian Leech stays a possibility so far
That ‘Jupiter Abyss’ feature…sure enough! That's when you wonder what is going on under those swirling clouds. It's so fascinating we're able to see these dark spots from Earth, but still there is a lot we don’t understand. Now Juno's sending back information, we can't wait to see what it's going to say next; this might totally revolutionize the way we think about Jupiter!
Jupiter Abyss
