Despite the apparent shrinkage of clouds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the storm itself is still going strong, new research suggests.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot represents the most powerful storm in the solar system. While earlier studies have suggested that the storm has been shrinking since at least the 1800s, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, argued Nov. 25 at a conference of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics that there is no evidence that the vortex that powers the cloud formation is changing.
“I don’t think its fortunes were ever bad,” Philip Marcus, a professor of fluid dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement released by the society. “It’s more like Mark Twain’s comment: The reports about [the storm’s] death have been greatly exaggerated.”