![\"\"](\"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/yupiter03082529.jpg\")
\nComposite image of Jupiter taken by Webb’s NIRCam camera. NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt<\/em><\/p>\n
While anticyclones do not produce storms on Earth on the same scale as cyclones, they can contribute to storms and severe weather, such as the Hartmut anticyclone during the 2018 cold wave in the British Isles, according to Weather and Radar.<\/p>\n
According to the Planetary Society, while scientists understand how anticyclones form on Earth, no one knows exactly how or when the Great Red Spot formed.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also unclear why it\u2019s so incredibly long-lived, although scientists have a few ideas. One hypothesis is that it\u2019s caught between two oppositely directed jet streams that act like two conveyor belts, causing the Great Red Spot to spin in both directions, Insider reports. Another hypothesis is that the vertical flow of heat and cold within the storm helps keep it alive. An important factor in its longevity is the fact that Jupiter, being a gas planet, has no surface, and therefore no friction to slow the storm down, JStor Daily reports.<\/p>\n
The Great Red Spot is 16,350 kilometres (10,159 mi) wide, about 1.3 times the width of Earth (12,740 km or 7,918 mi). However, it used to be much larger. When it was first observed in detail in the late 19th century, its width was estimated at about 48,280 kilometres (30,000 mi), more than three times the width of Earth.<\/p>\n
The reason for the Great Red Spot’s shrinking remains unknown. It’s possible that the weather patterns that keep it alive have simply weakened over the course of a few hundred years. There’s also evidence that the spot has not only shrunk but also grown throughout its history. According to NASA, some growth was recorded in the 1920s.<\/p>\n
In addition to shrinking, the spot appears to change shape, color, and other characteristics. For example, a 2018 study by NASA and UC Berkeley scientists found that the storm appeared to grow taller as it shrank. A few years later, the same researchers found that winds in the spot were gradually accelerating.<\/p>\n
Given that the reasons for its shrinking size are not fully understood, it is also unclear how long the spot may persist. Some studies suggest that it may disappear within a decade or two, but it may also persist for centuries.<\/p>\n
Despite its distinctive color, researchers aren’t entirely sure what exactly is causing the spot’s red hue. Some researchers believe it may be due to chemicals like ammonia at the top of the storm.<\/p>\n\n
The spot appears to change color over time, which is also unclear to researchers. Since 2014, it has been turning a reddish-orange color that has gradually intensified, according to NASA. The change may be due to changes in the storm’s chemical composition or the distribution of gases within and above it.
\nAlthough Jupiter is very different from Earth, its storm dynamics are similar. So a better understanding of Jupiter’s storms, including the Great Red Spot, could help scientists better understand Earth’s weather.<\/p>\n
The Great Red Spot has a smaller counterpart called the Lesser Red Spot or Junior Red Spot, which formed between 1998 and 2000 as a result of three oval-shaped white storms.<\/p>\n
According to a 2016 study, the gas above the Great Red Spot is hotter than anywhere else on Jupiter. Researchers believe the heating is caused by acoustic waves generated by the storm’s intense turbulence.<\/p>\n
The Hubble telescope has discovered that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking. Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot has been under constant observation since the 19th century, but this new phenomenon is unprecedented.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The venerable Hubble Space Telescope observed Jupiter’s Great Red Spot wobbling as if it were shrinking and expanding about every 90 days. The discovery was reported Oct. 9 in a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal.<\/p>\n Why this huge anticyclone, which has been shrinking in size for decades and is currently about 9,165 miles (14,750 kilometers) wide (though astrophotographer Damian Peach reports it is only 7,770 miles, or 12,500 kilometers, wide), behaves this way remains a mystery.<\/p>\n “With the high resolution of the Hubble telescope, we can say that the Great Red Spot is definitely contracting and expanding at the same time, moving faster and slower,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “This was very unexpected, and there is currently no hydrodynamic explanation.”<\/p>\n Astronomers led by Simon used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the Great Red Spot for 88.5 days from December 2023 to March 2024. Time-lapse images taken during this period show that the GRS periodically expands and contracts along its semi-major axis (the widest part of the ellipse).<\/p>\n “While we know its motion varies slightly in longitude, we didn’t expect its size to fluctuate as well,” Simon said.<\/p>\n Situated 22 degrees south of Jupiter’s equator, at the edge of the southern equatorial belt of its atmosphere, the Great Red Spot is subject to powerful jet streams that flow around the giant planet at speeds of 428 km\/h (266 mph). The jet streams prevent the enormous vortex from drifting to other latitudes, although it has been observed to drift westward relative to the rest of the atmosphere. This drift is not constant, but has been measured to speed up and slow down over a roughly 90-day oscillation.<\/p>\n “As the GRS speeds up and slows down, it moves against the wind-driven jet streams to its north and south,” said Mike Wong of the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n Apparently, the compression of the GRS shape detected by Hubble is related to this approximately 90-day wobble in its westward drift.<\/p>\n “It’s like a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to stick out because there’s too much filling in the middle,” Wong said.<\/p>\n The degree of compression appears to be anticorrelated with the drift velocity of the GRS. During periods of slower GRS drift, the vortex width and core size are at their maximum. In addition, the core glows brighter in ultraviolet light when it reaches its maximum, indicating less absorption by the haze in the atmosphere above it. As the drift accelerates, the GRS width and core size shrink. This may be a result of the GRS interaction with the surrounding atmosphere as its drift velocity increases.<\/p>\n Until now, Hubble had only observed one period of the oscillation in its entirety. Simon directs the Outer Planetary Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which has Hubble imaging each of the four giant planets of the outer solar system\u2014Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune\u2014at least once a year. But Hubble\u2019s study of the GRS was a separate project.<\/p>\n A group of leading amateur astronomers, such as Damian Peach, also regularly obtain high-resolution images of Jupiter, and their data is so good that Simon and the OPAL team often work with them. It is possible that this shrinkage of the spot is visible in amateur images, although Simon thinks it may be too small for amateur data to detect with any confidence, as the spot\u2019s width only changes by 0.3 degrees in longitude over a two-week period. However, now that we know it\u2019s happening, amateurs may be able to improve their images to detect it.<\/p>\n The overall compression of the GKP, now combined with the oscillatory compression, means the storm is undergoing interesting changes. Where will it end?<\/p>\n “Right now it’s overcrowding its latitudinal range relative to the wind field,” Simon said. “Once it shrinks within that range, the winds will actually hold it in place.” When that happens, its size may stabilize, but that’s still a guess until more data is collected.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Great Red Spot is an anticyclone, a long-term area of high pressure on Jupiter that creates persistent storms. Located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, this storm is the largest in our solar system and appears as a giant red spot on Jupiter’s surface. It has been around for 150 years, and may have been around longer, according to NASA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[543,40],"tags":[896,895,324],"class_list":{"0":"post-1927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-solar-system","8":"category-kosmos","9":"tag-anticyclone","10":"tag-great-red-spot","11":"tag-jupiter"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1929,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions\/1929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/pyatno060825.jpg\")
\nThis color-enhanced image of Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot was taken on April 1, 2018, by NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. The image is a composite of three separate images taken during Juno\u2019s 12th close flyby of the planet. Juno is a solar-powered spacecraft that spans a space the size of a basketball court and makes long, looping orbits around Jupiter. It is searching for answers about the origin and evolution of Jupiter, our solar system, and the giant planets across the cosmos. NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/MSSS\/Gerald Eichstedt\/Sean Doran<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/pyatno080825.jpg\")
\nEight images of the Great Red Spot taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between Dec. 10, 2023, and March 8, 2024. Look closely and you can see how its width changes. NASA\/ESA\/Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)<\/em><\/p>\n