Jupiter’s Red Spot is shrinking.

 

Jupiter’s Red Spot is shrinking.

Jupiter’s red spot is a huge swirling hurricane-like storm that used to be three times the size of Earth! However, the storm is shrinking over time, but even as it shrinks it gets taller.

Scientists are still stumped as to what’s causing this although they believe it may be to do with jet streams on Jupiter changing location or direction. 

A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters adds yet another piece to Jupiter’s puzzling Great Red Spot: The winds in its outermost stretches are speeding up and its shape is changing, becoming less cigar-like and more circular.

Does this mean the Great Red Spot is doomed to disappear? Not exactly. But some of the scientists involved in this latest research said they weren’t expecting what they found — and a concrete explanation is proving elusive.

“Nobody had predicted what was actually going on,” said the study’s co-author, Mike Wong, an astronomer at UC Berkeley. “When we found what we did, we struggled to explain it.”

It’s impossible to predict the fate of the Great Red Spot. Even with our most powerful telescopes, we can’t peer deep into the storm and find its roots, and no spacecraft sent to Jupiter has been equipped to fully answer this question. Despite the gaps in our knowledge, we can try to understand what the storm’s past and present say about its uncertain future.