Last year scientists started to notice that Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt, or SEB started to fade, but were surprised to find that it has now completely disappeared!
According to scientists this has happened before and the belt has never failed to return yet. The belt’s disappearances can be erratic.
“The SEB fades at irregular intervals, most recently in 1973-75, 1989-90, 1993, 2007, 2010,” said John Rogers, director of the British Astronomical Association’s Jupiter Section. “The 2007 fading was terminated rather early, but in the other years, the SEB was almost absent, as at present.”
The return of the SEB can be dramatic, NASA said.
“We can look forward to a spectacular outburst of storms and vortices when the ‘SEB revival’ begins,” Rogers told NASA. “It always begins at a single point, and a disturbance spreads out rapidly around the planet from there, often becoming spectacular even for amateurs eyeballing the planet through medium-sized telescopes.
“However,” he said, “we can’t predict when or where it will start. On historical precedent, it could be any time in the next two years.”
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