Viral NASA Video Of A Jupiter Pepperoni Storm Speaks To Your Inner Pizza Lover

A video shared by NASA on its Instagram page for National Pizza Day has gone viral for the most delicious reason. The video is from NASA's Juno mission, and showcases what cyclones look like in infrared on the giant gas planet.

NASA's Juno mission has been sending back some interesting pictures of Jupiter, which have given scientists more insight into the planet's atmosphere and that Great Red Spot that most everyone associates with the giant gas planet. The Great Red Spot is actually an anticyclone that was discovered nearly two centuries ago that is wider than Earth. But it is a short video of cyclones that are located at Jupiter's North Pole that has the internet buzzing these days.

The video was shared by NASA on its Instagram account in celebration of National Pizza Day. It shows what looks like a pepperoni pizza emerging from the North Pole of Jupiter. The video was created for a live public talk that was held back in May of 2018. In that video, speaker Steve Levin, Juno Project Scientist and Lead Co-Investigator for Juno's MicroWave Radiometer instrument, discussed at length what new discoveries were being made during the Juno mission. Part of that discussion included the video that was shared on Instagram.

Levin describes the video as a 3D view of what cyclones look like at the North Pole of Jupiter. The snippet on Instagram stops short of showing the cyclones at a close-up view. The cyclones are in fact thousands of kilometers wide, and many of them are bigger than the entirety of the United States. The infrared images were taken from the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard Juno.

The imagery of the circumpolar cyclones captured by Juno, shows five at the South Pole and eight at the North Pole, both with a cyclone at the center. Interestingly enough, none of these are anticyclones. In other words, they all spin in the same direction. It is not certain as to how they can all spin in the same direction and not swallow each other up in the process, or simply stop one another.

While NASA's Instagram pizza post may make you want to go order from your favorite pizzeria, it is actually an incredibly cool look at cyclonic storms that are taking place on a planet 100s of millions of miles away.