From the James Webb, this picture in infrared. Why is it glowing?
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/wp-content/uploads/sites/326/2022/08/JWST_2022-07-27_Jupiter.png
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The photo is telling us that the Great Red Spot is warmer than everything else in the photo. That much is clear. As to why it is warmer, that’s actually not a very well understood phenomenon. Scientists have some educated guesses, but it is far from a solved problem. I can give you the ELI5 for the best guess we have at the moment:
Rub your hands together a lot. They get warm, right? The friction causes them to heat up.
The Great Red Spot is essentially a giant planet-sized hurricane or typhoon. The chaotic swirliness of this tremendous storm makes it exceptionally noisy. The sound waves from all the noise causes shaking in the high atmosphere above the storm, and that shaking has a similar effect to rubbing your hands together, which heats it up. Since it’s happening high up, that means this warm layer is on top, and when we take a photograph of the planet from far away, the layer on top is the one we see.
In reality, the actual storm is much colder than the rest of the planet is. The storm just happens to be covered by a warm “lid” that shows up in photographs.
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