Reports Of The Great Red Spot's Death May Be Greatly Exaggerated

The Great Red Spot isn't as big as it used to be. Naturally, the conclusions many scientists (and me) came to is that the famed storm was dying. But according to new research, Jupiter may not be getting rid of the Great Red Spot any time soon.

We can only see the top of the storm. Duh. We haven't installed a weather station in the middle of the Great Red Spot. But because we can only get a visual assessment, when the Great Red Spot shrinks, it sure looks like its dissipating. But when scientists took a closer look at its behavior, it turns out that whatever is driving the storm is still going strong. In that regard, nothing has changed, and so long as the Great Red Spot's driving forces still exist, it isn't going anywhere.

The Great Red Spot Is Disappearing

Ask anyone to tell you the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Jupiter, and I bet they'll say the Great Red Spot. It's impossible to imagine Jupiter without it, ask a child to draw Jupiter and it'll be the first thing they come up with. For as long as we've been pointing telescopes at it, the Great Red Spot has been there.

No storm lasts forever, even on Jupiter, and the Great Red Spot has been shrinking for decades. When Voyager 2 passed by in 1979, the storm was more than twice the size of Earth, a far cry from observations during the 19th century, when the Great Red Spot was at least four times the size of Earth, but still pretty big. But now the Great Red Spot is only slightly bigger than the Earth, and it may be gone entirely in 20 years.

Is it going to be a difficult time when the Great Red Spot finally disappears? Given how much trouble people have accepting Pluto isn't a planet anymore, I'd say yes. I'm going to say the memory of the Great Red Spot will outlive the storm's demise, though whether it will live longer than the storm is another question entirely. Can we keep up the Great Red Spot mythos for hundreds of years? That may be tricky.