This storm is a sigh to the halt, towering five miles into the sky. But why the color?

 

Understanding the colors of Jupiter, which was one of the first things noted by astronomers a couple of hundreds years ago, still eludes us in terms of the detailed explanation.

 

The other unsolved puzzle since the Voyager’s beamed back the first weather reports is why there is a red spot at all.

 

We sort of have expected as we got close, things would be rather quiet because how could a storm last for so many years. But in fact it was more turbulent. And that raised the mystery, how can a storm last for so long?

 

Hamid Kellay grapples with this part of the problem in a very down-to-earth way, blowing miniature Jupiter bubbles in his lab in Bordeaux.

 

The red spot is huge. You can put two to three earths in it. So everything is telling us that things like this should be just annihilated by the turbulence flow around them.

 

By heating a half soap bubble through contact with a metal surface, he mimics how the thin fluid atmosphere of Jupiter might respond to heat rising from deep inside the gas ball planet. Sure enough, swirling storm patterns emerge spontaneously.

 

The interest of the soup bubble, or at least this one, is that we get single odyssey that generates, we don't do anything to generate, I mean they’re just new created out of the blue, basically out of the turbulent motion around them.

 

Space agencies spent billions of dollars to send spacecraft to look at these things. Hamid Kellay’s approach lets you explore Jupiter without leaving your bathtub. There is only so much, though, you can resolve from a safe distance. To get to know the planet’s heart and soul, you will need to take the plunge.