Jupiter has the Solar System’s famous Great Red Spot.
The Great Red Spot is a gigantic, long-lived storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere. It is an anticyclone, meaning its circulation moves around a high-pressure centre in the opposite direction from a cyclone in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. The storm is wider than Earth, although its size has changed substantially over periods of observation.
Astronomers have tracked a red spot in Jupiter’s cloud belts since the nineteenth century, but it is uncertain whether the modern storm is exactly the same structure seen in earlier observations. The storm’s reddish colour may result from chemical compounds altered by sunlight and lifted from deeper atmospheric layers.
The Great Red Spot is not a solid surface feature. Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid ground like Earth’s continents. Its clouds are driven by powerful jet streams, and spacecraft such as Voyager and Juno have supplied important observations of the planet’s atmosphere.