The largest storm in our solar system, an 8,700-mile-wide anticyclone on Jupiter long beloved by astronomers, may be slowly fizzling out.
Earth’s atmosphere is in such constant flux that we have a tired old saying about it: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” If we lived on Jupiter — where a single storm has been raging uninterrupted for almost two centuries, and possibly much longer — we’d have to muster more patience., an enormous high-pressure system which astronomers have tracked regularly since the late 19th century, is steadily dwindling.
In fact, that initial structure may be partly responsible for its shrinking. A storm's internal winds tend to make it rounder, as seen in satellite images of hurricanes on Earth. (The main difference between them and the Great Red Spot is that the latter is an— may be whittling that unsustainable oval into a more durable shape. Indeed, its waist is the dimension that’s narrowing fastest.
“Those are the sorts of things we're going to be monitoring over the next few years,” she says. But when — or even if — they’ll have a dramatic effect on the spot, “your guess is as good as mine. It could be 20 to 30 years, it could be 200 years.” Or, alternatively, the storm could settle into equilibrium at a stable size and outlive us all.set its depth at about 300 miles, suggesting the roots of the vortex extend deeper than anticipated, below the storm’s cloud base.
For the next official update on proportions, astronomers await the annual data delivery from Hubble, which will turn its lens toward Jupiter in November (though amateurs, most notably a Brit named
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