The Shrinking Giant Red Spot of Jupiter

schwit1 (797399) writes "Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling storm feature larger than Earth — is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about since the 1930s, but now these striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture the spot at a smaller size than ever before."

Comments

Global warming

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Must be global warming...

Re:Global warming

[Savage-Rabbit]

Must be global warming...

Nah, the Neocon delegation must have reached mount Doom and burned the communist manifesto so the great eye of Sauron will now shrink until it disappears and Jupiter implodes thus purging the threat of environmentalism from the face of the universe forever.

Re:Global warming

[KeensMustard]

You might laugh, but I have heard people use similar astronomical events as proof against the anthropogenic cause of the recent warming. "Ice caps are melting on Mars!" etc. etc.

We will likely discover soon that the red spot is shrinking because in fact, it's jupiter's face and he is palming it at the the stupidity of the gullible.

Re:Global warming

[huge]

No, it's not downsizing, it's just restructuring overlapping functions after all the mergers.

Re:Global warming

[KeensMustard]

Yes, because the fact that other planets in the same solar system are experiencing similar warming(if such is indeed the case) has absolutely no value in interpreting why this planet is doing the same

Are you saying we can't (and aren't) measuring the output of the sun directly? Why would proxies be a better measure? Detail please.

Re:Global warming

[Curunir_wolf]

I'd rather pay that than the current "save the highly profitable oil companies" subsidy

The mods on the 2 comments above really demonstrate the hive mind / political / religious attitudes of the typical Slashdot mods.

The saddest part is, even though the /. crowd is generally more intelligent than most other Internet discussion sites, yet even here the lie that "big oil" is getting "subsidies" is not corrected, but repeated (this is how a lie becomes unquestioned by the shitizens).

Basically, Percentage Depletion is the oil and gas industry’s version of a depreciation deduction for its main asset, which is the oil and natural gas in the ground, commonly known as its reserves. Every industry of any kind is allowed a depreciation deduction on its assets under the U.S. Tax Code, but, far from being a “subsidy” for “big oil”, this tax treatment was in fact repealed for all integrated oil companies, i.e., ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, etc., in 1975, and is today available only to independent producers and royalty owners. So repeal of this extremely long-standing, completely common tax treatment would have no effect on “big oil” at all, and would in fact hit small producers and royalty owners harder than anyone else.

Another great example of the specious mischaracterization of these tax treatments is the Manufacturer’s Tax Deduction, more commonly referred to as Section 199. The Section 199 provision was enacted by congress in 2004 as a means of encouraging manufacturers to relocate overseas jobs to the U.S., and is in no way specific to or limited to the oil and gas industry. In fact, the oil & gas industry’s ability to take advantage of this provision has already been singled out for limitation – in 2008, Congress reduced the industry’s deduction under this provision to 2/3rds of what other manufacturing industries are allowed to deduct.

The tax code contains a couple of credits related to the oil and gas industry – the Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Tax Credit, and the Marginal Well Tax Credit. Far from being “subsidies” to “big oil”, these tax credits are used almost exclusively by small to mid-size independent producers who tend to become the operators of marginal oil and gas fields as they age and are divested by the larger companies. The EOR credit was implemented in 1990, and the Marginal Well Credit was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994.

Finally, let’s talk about Intangible Drilling Costs (IDCs), another feature of the federal tax code that will enjoy its’ 100th birthday in 2013. Basically, IDCs are the costs incurred by the oil and gas industry in the drilling of its wells. Since drilling wells is the only means of finding oil and natural gas, IDCs essentially amount to what any other industry would be able to deduct as a part of its cost of goods sold, a concept of accounting and tax law as old as the tax code itself. Independent producers and royalty owners are allowed an election to either a) expense these costs in the year they are incurred, or b) amortize them over a 5-year period. Again, most media reports commonly characterize this as a “subsidy” for “big oil”, as does the Obama Administration. The truth is that “big oil” – the ExxonMobils, Chevrons, Shells and BPs of the world – benefit much less from this tax treatment, it having been severely limited to them by congress in 1986, and again in 1992. And the truth also is that IDCs are not a “subsidy” to anyone engaged in the oil and gas business.

Bottom line: Despite the Administration’s rhetoric that has been so widely repeated in the press, the tax treatments in question are not “subsidies” that are in any way outside of the mainstream of tax treatments commonly available to all U.S. industries. Rather than being mostly a benefit to “big oil”

Re: Global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

The real hidden subsidy is the global security provided by the US military to security European energy supplies and which hides the true $300/b cost.

Monolith!

[gigne]

all these planets are yours except europa

Re:Monolith!

[Vinegar Joe]

Uranus is mine!!!

Re:Monolith!

[boristdog]

I haven't heard that since I did a nickle in Leavenworth.

It's all about gravity

[Vinegar Joe]

The average Jovian's carbon footprint is much heavier than a Terran's.

Re:It's all about gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

The average Jovian's carbon footprint is much heavier than a Terran's.

I think it's not so much gravity, but rather the division by zero in your calculations.

Hubble Rules!

[thephydes]

Another testament to one of the most amazing "machines" ever created. Hubble is a truly awesome telescope, and the pictures that come from it continue to amaze and astound us.

Re:Hubble Rules!

[S.O.B.]

I agree that we can learn a lot using telescopes and autonomous/semi-autonomous robots but nothing captures the imagination quite like one of us actually going there.

Re:Hubble Rules!

[Solandri]

Just to put some perspective on this, the Shuttle was designed to launch NRO spy satellites. The entire reason its cargo bay was as large as it was was so it could carry a spy satellite into orbit. Hubble was also designed to fit in this bay, so coincidentally ended up being almost the exact same size as a spy satellite.

Since the Shuttle began operating, 16 such spy satellites have been launched into orbit (not all aboard the shuttle - some go into polar orbits and are launched from Vandenberg AFB). 13 KH-11, 2 Misty, 1 EIS. So that's basically 16 Hubble-like satellites for spying vs. 1 Hubble for exploration (though to be fair there have been 5 service missions to Hubble). And I'm not including the spy satellites which used film and were operational until the 1980s. The NRO even donated two Hubble-sized optical assemblies (main and secondary mirrors) believed to be from unused or canceled spy satellites to NASA.

This probably comes across like an anti-NRO rant. I don't mean it that way - the NRO is simply doing the job it's been tasked with by our politicians. I'm just pointing out that our mistrust and suspicion of each other consumes a helluva lot more of our time and money than our desire to explore and discover new things (not created by other people).

Must be global cooling...

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know it shrinks when it gets cold.

This downsizing

[oodaloop]

downsizing

In my organization, we call it rightsizing. Of course, we didn't call it that while we were expanding.

Better question

[jfdavis668]

What has keep it going all these years?

2001

[docwatson223]

Didn't Arthur C. Clarke write about this - like right before the Monolith ignited Jupiter? ;)

Rate of shrinkage

[Zocalo]

For those that don't RTFA it seems like the rate of shrinkage has dramatically accelerated in the last few years - the extent of this being something that probably ought to be included in the summary. It was ~23,500km across when the Voyager probes imaged it in 1979/1980 and is down to ~16,500km in the latest Hubble image, yet the current rate of shrinkage is quoted at almost 1,000km/year since 2012. That makes me think it's behaving like many Terrestial storms and it's going to blow over and dissipate quite quickly, which could mean that it could be gone entirely before the end of the decade. While it was never going to be around indefinitely I'm still somewhat stunned at the notion that I'm probably going to outlive something that has always seemed like a permanent fixture and a defining feature of Jupiter akin to Saturn's rings.

Re:Rate of shrinkage

[Noryungi]

Interesting. Makes me wonder, what is they age of the feature?

Oldest reports of the Red Spot on Jupiter have been tentatively dated (roughly) to the late 1600s. It was studied by Cassini (the original astronomer, not the satellite of the same name). It's been studied extensively since the early 1800s. So we are talking about a storm raging on Jupiter that has been going on for 400+ years at least.

Think about this: that storm -- 3 times to size of the Earth at its biggest -- has been visible from the Earth for 400+ years. With winds hundreds of kilometers an hour running inside.

And now it's dying, and we may be witnesses to an amzing events in the coming years. Thinking about it gives me chills.

Re:Rate of shrinkage

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not clear if the storm seen in the 1600s is the same as the one we're seeing now. It's only been continuously watched since 1878.

Re:Rate of shrinkage

[gstoddart]

So we are talking about a storm raging on Jupiter that has been going on for 400+ years at least.

And, to put that into perspective, Jupiter is likely, what, several billion years old?

To expect that this has been a permanent feature of Jupiter is thinking on human timescales.

On astronomical timescales, this may well be a transient blip.

incorrect - 40 astronauts required to date.

[ferret4]

5 crews of 7 astronauts have gone into space on repair missions, including the first mission to repair Hubble's faulty lenses that would have rendered it useless. Add to that the 5 astronauts that took Hubble into space in the first place and you have a total of 40 people in space. Some of those 40 may possibly be the same across 6 missions, I'll let you research that yourself.

Damn, I feel old.

[B33rNinj4]

Pluto isn't a planet, and now this? It's a sad day indeed.

Shrinkage?

[mu51c10rd]

Maybe it just got out of the pool...

It eats smaller spots.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

What has keep it going all these years?

As I understand it (I DON'T study this, but just recall previous articles):

The Great Red Spot is a big storm. It happens that the dynamics of storms on Jupiter is such that they move east/west at different speeds, and when they collide they combine. So Jupiter usually has a big Borg storm that has been growig by assimilating little storms more than it has been shrinking by "blowing out".

I have also read that such storms, though very long-lived, have died out even in the geologically-short period Jupiter has been observed, and new ones grown up later - not necessarily in the same hemisphere.

I haven't heard of a situation where there have been two or more of them - either one each in the northern and soutern hemisphere or two in the same hemisphere at different lattitudes. But observation of Jupiter is young in terms of the length of its weather cycles.

Similarly, Earth's ocean currents are also apparently "weather" - exhibiting positive feedback and chaotic behavior, not just a constant response to heat sources, sinks, and seabed geometry - but with an even longer time scale than Jupiter's storms.