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The Shrinking Giant Red Spot of Jupiter

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-small dept.

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."

6 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Monolith! by gigne · · Score: 5, Funny

    all these planets are yours except europa

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    1. Re:Monolith! by Vinegar+Joe · · Score: 5, Funny

      Uranus is mine!!!

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  2. Must be global cooling... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We all know it shrinks when it gets cold.

  3. Rate of shrinkage by Zocalo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Rate of shrinkage by Noryungi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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  4. incorrect - 40 astronauts required to date. by ferret4 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.