Poor Jupiter. It's breaking out^*.
The Great Red Spot is a vast, planet-sized hurricane that's been blowing on Jupiter for hundreds of years. In 2006 it was joined by a smaller storm -- though still thousands of miles across -- called Oval BA (no relation). And now a third red spot has popped up! The third storm (the smaller one in the middle left on the Hubble picture above) was a more normal whitish oval up until recently, when it suddenly turned red. It's unclear why; in general the colors of the storms indicate their chemical composition, and red usually means complex organic compounds. Maybe they were dredged up from deep beneath Jupiter's cloud tops, or maybe the storm gained altitude, high enough that incoming solar ultraviolet light was able to reassemble the molecules into new ones that are red (that's called photolysis, for those keeping track at home). That ...
