Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Doing Just Fine

The solar system’s biggest storm has erupted on planet Jupiter for at least 200 years, in what many of us know as The Great Red Spot. That cyclone, which once could have consumed about three Earths, has peered a bit thin these days, moving some to acknowledge its total fate could occur within a couple decades. But some recent slimming doesn’t necessarily mean it’s on death’s doorstep.
At least that’s the conclusion of Philip Marcus, an engineer specializing in fluid dynamics at Berkeley, who defended the Great Red Spot’s vitality at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting on Monday. Observations of red bits flaking off from the main storm combined with decades of data showing the colossal oval shrinking and rounding have led some to fret that the superstorm is waning. But Marcus’s simulations suggest there’s no cause for concern, and that the underlying vortex remains healthy.
But plumbing the depths of the Jovian atmosphere, which extends down thousands of miles, is tough when you can’t see past its surface. The Great Red Spot’s cloud tops are definitely changing, according to Amy Simon, who researches planetary atmospheres at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, but it’s hard to know what those changes mean. “We don’t know how deep it really goes,” she says. “It could be that very, very deep down nothing is changing and everything we’re seeing is higher up. We can’t tell how tightly that ties together.”
Both researchers agree on one recent symptom being benign: observed flaking does not indicate that the storm is disintegrating. Amateur astronomers noticed in early 2019 that red patches appeared to be “flaking” or “peeling” off the main mass, prompting speculation that the spot wasn’t long for that world.
But these events are pretty normal on Jupiter, Simon says. They take place when the storm’s winds pull in surrounding material and hold it long enough to turn them red (no one knows how the clouds get their ruddy hue, but some suspect it’s related to altitude and exposure to sunlight). Then when those mini storms run into incoming sections blowing the other direction, reddish material can fly out at any direction. “It’s like having two fire hoses aimed at each other,” Marcus said, according to the New York Times.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/story/space/jupiter-great-red-spot-not-dead/