NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope retains an eye fixed on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a ten,000-mile-wide storm system that has been swirling for not less than 190 years and probably for much longer. Recent knowledge from the telescope signifies that the spot’s outer winds have picked up velocity previously decade.

The storm has an “outer lane” and an “inner lane” of winds, each of which rotate counterclockwise. While the outer lane has sped up lately, the winds nearer to the middle of the spot have been actually shifting a lot slower in 2020 than they have been again in 2009. The analysis exploring these wind traits was published final month within the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Since we don’t have a storm chaser plane at Jupiter, we can’t continuously measure the winds on site,” mentioned Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA press release. “Hubble is the only telescope that has the kind of temporal coverage and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter’s winds in this detail.”

The pickup in wind velocity was regular: lower than a 2-mile-per-hour change per Earth 12 months from 2009 to 2020. It’s solely as a result of the staff had 11 years of Hubble knowledge, and that Hubble can see Jupiter with such precision, that they may pick the pattern. The winds are blowing at round 400 miles per hour, barely slower than the cruising velocity of a business airliner.

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Though Jupiter appears serene in images—a big marble in space—the planet is a turbid ball of gas that is constantly moving. Just last year, an entire new spot popped up on the planet. And for all its fame, even the Great Red Spot is something of an enigma; our modern instruments can’t probe much of the storm besides what happens on the surface.

“Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data,” said Michael Wong, a planetary scientist specializing in atmospheres at the University of California at Berkeley, and the paper’s lead author, in the same release. Wong added that the recent trend is “an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what’s fueling the Great Red Spot and how it’s maintaining energy.”

Planetary scientists do know some things about the spot. It has a tiered structure in which the storm’s higher clouds are toward the center, and the outer edges of the storm are deeper in the planet. The storm is slowly becoming more circular compared to the oval it’s long been.

The storm has been observed for nearly 200 years—maybe even 350 years, as it’s hard to say whether spots described by earlier astronomers were one and the same as the Great Red Spot—but it’ll likely take more time and better instruments to dig deeper into the tempestuous mystery at Jupiter’s heart.

More: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is About to Reveal Its Mysteries