Winds of baffling storm on Jupiter accelerate to 400 mph. ‘No one has ever seen this’

One of the most notorious “anticyclones” in the solar system is picking up intensity, with a ring of wind surpassing 400 mph, NASA has learned.

It’s on Jupiter and the storm is a mind boggling 10,000 miles in diameter, NASA says.

“Like the speed of an advancing race car driver, the winds in the outermost ‘lane’ of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are accelerating — a discovery only made possible by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has monitored the planet for more than a decade,” the space agency reported Monday.

“The massive storm’s crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour —and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself. The red spot is legendary in part because humans have observed it for more than 150 years.”

It’s possible the storm has existed far longer, however, “possibly for more than 350 years,” NASA says.

The discovery is all the more mysterious because only the outer rim is speeding up. This “high speed ring” saw about an 8% increase between 2009 and 2020, data shows. The change amounts to about 1.6 miles faster “per hour per Earth year,” experts says.

“In contrast, the horizontal winds near the red spot’s innermost region are moving significantly more slowly,” NASA said.

What does It mean? NASA isn’t sure.

“That’s hard to diagnose, since Hubble can’t see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data,” researcher Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, said in the release.

“When I initially saw the results, I asked: ‘Does this make sense?’ No one has ever seen this before.”

If anything, the speed should be decreasing, according to a report on the data published by the American Geophysical Union.

NASA scientists believe Jupiter’s tumultuous red spot is “an upwelling of material from Jupiter’s interior.”

“If seen from the side, the storm would have a tiered wedding cake structure with high clouds at the center cascading down to its outer layers,” NASA says. “Astronomers have noted that it is shrinking in size and becoming more circular than oval in observations spanning more than a century.”

NASA reported the data two weeks after observers saw a “bright flash” on Jupiter that indicated it was hit by “something big.” The “space rock” may have burned up in the atmosphere, because “no visible scar was left” on the planet’s surface, Space.com reports.