05.13
The planet Jupiter has taken off one of it’s belts. It actually happens for a little while every several years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not surprising to look up and see it missing.
“This is not the first time the south equatorial belt has disappeared. It was absent in 1973 when NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft took the first closeup images of the planet and also temporarily vanished in the early 1990s.
The bands may normally appear dark simply because pale, high-altitude clouds prevalent in other regions of the planet are missing there, revealing darker clouds below, says Glenn Orton of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “You’re looking into different layers of the cloud structures of the planet,” he told New Scientist.
According to this theory, the south equatorial belt disappears when whitish clouds form on top of it, blocking our view of the darker clouds. But it is not clear what causes these whitish clouds to form in the south equatorial belt at some times and not others, Orton says.” ~New Scientist