Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot is getting... squeezed? 🤔

Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot is Acting Weird, and Scientists Can’t Explain it

Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot has been a raging, swirling anticyclone for over 150 years 🌪️ And ‘giant’ is a bit of an understatement: two entire planet Earths could fit inside the storm. 

Although freaky to think about, we’ve been observing the Great Red Spot round-the-clock since the 19th century. We’ve always known that the storm moves up and down a bit, and in recent decades, we noticed it shrinking slightly.

Other than that, the storm has remained predictable – until now.

🔴 Earlier this month, the Hubble Space Telescope detected that the storm has been oscillating, as though a giant pair of hands is squeezing the storm from the top and bottom. 

🔴 As Mike Wong, co-investigator of the new research, put it: "It's similar to a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to bulge out when there's too much filling in the middle."

🔴 The jiggling, stress-ball-like motion repeats every 90 days. The white clouds near the storm also seem to move every 90 days, making it unlikely the pattern is just a coincidence. 

The Great Red Spot has enjoyed an aura of mystery, and this unexplainable new development only adds to the mystique 🕵️

The First-Ever Black Hole… Throuple?

Black Holes are rarely lone wolves. Most are detected as part of a pair: a Black Hole plus a secondary object like a star (or another Black Hole), spiraling together in a cosmic dance 💫 🌟

This week, however, physicists at MIT and Caltech announced the first-ever discovery of a ‘Black Hole Triple,’ and the implications are significant: 

⭐ The center of the trio is a Black Hole that’s actively consuming the second member of the group, a nearby small star. 

⭐ Researchers didn’t expect to find a third object caught in the Black Hole’s gravitational pull, but a second star also appeared to be circling the original duo. 

⭐ The weirdest part? The second star is extremely far away – so far that it shouldn’t have survived the supernova explosion that formed the Black Hole it’s circling. 

In other words, the second star has scientists questioning how Black Holes even form. 

The team behind the discovery believes this could be the first evidence we’ve found of a Black Hole forming through ‘direct collapse,’ a gentler alternative to the drama of a supernova 🎇

Cheers to the happy throuple!

A Multi-Part Finale: There May Have Been More Than One Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid

According to new research, an underwater crater off the coast of Guinea in West Africa isn’t your average crater: it was formed by a large asteroid around the end of the Cretaceous period ☄️

Sound familiar? That’s around the same time as the dinosaur-killing asteroid you already knew about 🪦

Though not quite as catastrophic as the dinosaur killer, 3D seismic imaging painted a terrifying picture. Upon impact, the asteroid:

🪨 Liquified sediments beneath the ocean floor, forming faults below the seabed.

🪨 Triggered landslides thousands of square miles beyond the rim.

🪨 Caused half a mile-high tsunamis across the Atlantic. 

Thanks for reading Latest in Space! Forward this to a friend who loves free weekly newsletters.

Also if you’re interested in movies and TV shows, we have a newsletter for that 🍿