Great Red Spot on Jupiter is perhaps not dying, or maybe it is - India Today, Indiatoday.in

Great Red Spot, giant Jupiter’s trademark feature, is making headlines for some reports said that it is dying. Well, new reports suggest Great Red Spot is here to stay for a long time.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm rolling counterclockwise between two bands of clouds.

A report explained that the system of Great Red Spot or GRS for short once was “elongated” and it was recently that astronomers stumbled upon“blades”and“flakes”.

In 2019, astronomers reported that Jupiter was shedding large blades and flakes of red clouds.

On Monday, a professor of fluid dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a presentation. Professor Philip Marcus, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, argued that some people believe that flaking is seen as the storm weakening. He was quick to add that is but an expected natural phenomenon, according to a Futurism report.

It seems that the recent flakes and blades made people believe that the Great Red Spot maybe breaking apart but Philip Marcus’s calculations have shed light from a different angle on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm rolling counterclockwise between two bands of clouds. The red band above and to the right (northeast) of the Great Red Spot contains clouds moving westward and around the north of the giant tempest. The white clouds to the left (southwest) of the storm are moving eastward to the south of the spot.

Gas giant Jupiter is the solar system’s largest world with about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter is home to one of the largest and longest lasting storm systems known, the Great Red Spot.

View reveals Jupiter’s Great Red Spot | Credits: Nasa, ESA, A Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) and MH Wong (University of California, Berkeley)

The GRS is so large it

Comparison with historical notes indicate that the storm spans only about one third of the surface area it had 150 years ago.

Modern GRS data indicate that the storm continues to constrict its surface area, but is also becoming slightly taller, vertically.

And since no one is absolutely sure about the future of GRS, including the possibility that if the shrinking trend continues, the GRS might one day even do what smaller spots on Jupiter have done – disappear completely.