It’s been around for centuries, but Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking, and doing so at an accelerating rate. Astronomers can still impress people by talking of a single storm larger than the whole Earth, but maybe not for much longer.The Great Red Spot remains the largest storm in the solar system. It is a high pressure anticyclonic storm system at latitude 22° in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. How long it is has been there no one knows, but something similar was described by Cassini in 1665 and even Galileo thought he saw something that might have been a predecessor. A century ago it stretched roughly 40,000km east to west and 14,000km north-south. The north-south axis hasn’t changed all that much, but the long axis is now 16,500km long leading to suggestions the spot will soon be round,
read more Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Shrinking | I Fucking Love Science.
