The Hubble Space Telescope has recently confirmed that Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot,” a storm larger than the Earth itself, is quickly shrinking for unknown reasons.
Amy Simon, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the spot’s latest measurement, 10,250 miles wide, is the smallest it has ever been recorded at.
“Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the spot is now just under 16,500 kilometers across, the smallest diameter we’ve ever measured,” Simon said in a news release.
Originally observed in the 1800s, the GRS was estimated to be about 25,000 miles across (three Earth’s could fit inside!). But since the 1930s, observers of the celestial giant have recorded its consistently shrinking storm.
In 1995, the Hubble took a photo of the spot which was measured to be about 13,020 miles wide. In 2009, that number shrank to 11,130 miles.
Observations starting around 2012 brought attention to an increase in the shrinkage rate of the spot. The spot is actually getting smaller by 580 miles a year.
“In our new observations it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm,” Simon said in a news release. “We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change by altering the internal dynamics of the Great Red Spot.”