BERLIN » Astronomers using a telescope on Mauna Kea say a massive hurricane on Jupiter could be heating up parts of the gas giant’s upper atmosphere.

The storm — known as the Great Red Spot — is more than twice the size of Earth and has been churning for over a century.

Scientists from the United States and Britain, using data from the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, say heat from the sun doesn’t explain why parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere are hundreds of degrees hotter than elsewhere on the planet.

The phenomenon was discovered more than 40 years ago and dubbed the giant-planet “energy crisis.”

In a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, the researchers concluded that the upper atmosphere is probably being blasted from below with sound or gravity waves.

The astronomers used the IRTF telescope on Mauna Kea, operated by NASA and the University of Hawaii, to observe infra-red light from Jupiter and measure the temperature of the planet.

“The Great Red Spot is a terrific source of energy to heat the upper atmosphere at Jupiter, but we had no prior evidence of its actual effects upon observed temperatures at high altitudes,” explained Luke Moore, a study co-author and research scientist in the Center for Space Physics at Boston University.

“Energy transfer to the upper atmosphere from below has been simulated for planetary atmospheres, but was not supported by observations,” said James O’Donoghue, research scientist at BU, and lead author of the study. “The extremely high temperatures observed above the storm appear to be the ‘smoking gun’ of this energy transfer, indicating that planet-wide heating is a plausible explanation for the ‘energy crisis.’ ” The authors conclude that the storm in the Great Red Spot produces acoustic waves of energy that heat the upper atmosphere — an effect that has also been observed over the Andes Mountains right here on Earth.

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Star-Advertiser staff contributed to this story.