It’s a swirling mass of bright red cloud, more than 8,000 miles wide and large enough to engulf the Earth.
but The Great Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter It’s shrinking, and scientists may finally understand why.
Experts say the sunspot has long maintained its vast size by engulfing smaller storms, but that its size may be gradually shrinking.
But the giant red swirling storm remains a mystery.
Astronomers don’t know exactly when the sunspots formed, why they formed, or even why they’re red.
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Located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a swirling, red-orange, high-pressure ellipsoid over 10,000 miles wide.
Winds of over 200 miles per hour blow counterclockwise and create a high pressure system.
No one knows when it started, but humans have been observing it since about 1831. And probably sooner than that.
However, for nearly a century, and especially over the past 50 years, the population has been declining.
Since 2012, the sunspot has become more circular and has been shrinking at a rate of about 580 miles (900 kilometers) per year.
In the late 19th century it was estimated to be about 24,000 miles wide, but today it is about 8,700 miles.
“Over the past 200 years, many people have observed the Great Red Spot and been fascinated by it, just like I have,” said Caleb Keaveney, a space meteorology doctoral student at Yale University and lead author of the paper.
“Many of them were not professional astronomers, just people who had a passion and curiosity.”
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Keaveney and his colleagues used a computer model to simulate the interactions of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot with smaller, temporary storms.
By feeding the Great Red Spot “small storm food,” they could control how big or small it became.
In fact, models suggested that the Great Red Spot grew by “eating” smaller storms.
So the fact that sunspots are getting smaller suggests that there are fewer of these small storms.
This is not what the study discovered, or set out to discover, but it’s a question the team hopes to investigate next.
“Whether the Great Red Spot is actually becoming more prey to storms than before is a question for future research,” Keaveney told MailOnline.
By determining what causes sunspots to shrink, scientists may be able to predict their “final demise.”
Jupiter is famously the largest planet in the solar system, with a diameter of about 88,695 miles (142,800 km).
Jupiter is a gas giant, so there’s no place for a spacecraft to land on it, but it also wouldn’t be possible for it to fly away unscathed.
Jupiter’s distinctive stripes and swirls are actually cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water suspended in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.
According to the team, further modelling will enable researchers to refine their new findings, which may shed light on the early formation of the Great Red Spot.
“Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the oldest and largest meteorological features in the Solar System,” the researchers wrote in a 2010 paper. Icarus.
“Model simulation and observational efforts like this are necessary to finally reveal the dynamics behind the evolution of the Solar System’s oldest and largest vortices.”
