The shape of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is changing. Here’s why.
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What is the Great Red Spot?
The Great Red Spot is a high-pressure system located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. It’s a powerful anticyclone, swirling counterclockwise around the center. And because of its shape and structure, the Great Red Spot is sometimes described as a “pancake.” It’s a charming — if somewhat deceiving — descriptor for a storm that rages at about 30 to 680 kilometers per hour (270 to 425 miles per hour).
Scientists have been tracking the Great Red Spot for about 150 years, but no one knows exactly when or how it formed; it might be much older than the earliest records indicate. Though the Spot has since become known for its ferocity — even feeding on smaller Jovian storms — the size of its bite may be changing.
“In the Voyager era, you could fit about three Earth across the Great Red Spot, but it’s been steadily shrinking and is now just bigger than the Earth,” said the paper’s co-author Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard.
Like all storms, the Great Red Spot is dynamic. Its constitution is always in flux, sometimes just slightly. Simon and Wong observed some of these changes in their latest paper: as the storm contracts, there’s evidence to suggest it’s getting “taller” rather than wider. It’s unclear how long the Great Red Spot will continue on this course, or how long it will continue at all.
Why is the Great Red Spot red?
While we have some ideas, the truth is literally and figuratively hazy.
“We don’t know what chemical compounds make it red,” Simon said. “But because the Spot is covered with high dense haze or clouds, we think that some photochemical products like smog are involved.”
There are some compelling — and conflicting — explanations for the Great Red Spot’s signature hue. Some scientists think the red color comes from chemicals burrowed deep beneath the storm’s cloud tops. But other researchers say the rusty color comes from sunlight splitting up various chemicals in the storm’s upper atmosphere, which would mean the rest of the Great Red Spot is actually not very red at all. We might just see the “sunburn” at the top.
How are the Great Red Spot’s winds changing?
In a word: unevenly.
Back in 2019, amateur astronomers noticed pieces of the Great Red Spot “flaking” off the main body of the storm. The phenomenon led some scientists to question whether the Great Red Spot was disintegrating.
At that point, Simon, Wong and their team had already been combing through Hubble Telescope data from 2009 to 2020. The researchers studied the Great Red Spot’s velocity fields before and after the “flaking” observed in 2019; after much statistical testing, they confirmed that winds in the storm’s “outermost lane” or “high-speed ring” had increased by about 8%. Around the storm center, however, winds moved much more languidly.
“When we first looked at the GRS shrinking, we somewhat expected to see the winds increase, conserving angular momentum, like a figure skater pulling in her arms,” Simon said. “But that’s not what we measured. What we are seeing now is that both stretching and spinning faster happen, though we can’t yet say how continuous either trend is, or if this is part of the GRS eventually disappearing.”
It’s important to note that these developments, though surprising, are actually pretty small. According to Wong, the team was only able to spot the shifts in wind speed because they were looking at a relatively large time window.
“If you had a couple of observations a couple of years apart you wouldn’t see it,” Wong said. “It’s only by looking over an 11-year period that you can see the change.”
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