Planetary scientists have issued a tornado warning for Jupiter, with the discovery that magnetic vortices twisting down from the planet's ionosphere into its deep atmosphere are resulting in giant, ultraviolet-absorbing anticyclones each the size of our Earth.
These anticyclonic storms manifest as dark ovals, and are visible as dense hazes of aerosols in Jupiter's stratosphere. However, they're only noticeable in ultraviolet (UV) light and were first seen at Jupiter's north and south poles by the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 1990s. They were then confirmed at Jupiter's north pole by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it flew past in 2000 on its way to Saturn. But no one knew where the dark ovals came from.
