Jupiter's Great Red Spot is changing and shrinking.

The giant planet Jupiter differs from all others not only in its size. Astronomers have long distinguished it, because near the equator one can observe an interesting natural phenomenon, which was called the Big Red Spot. This, as you can understand, is a giant hurricane, which is so big that several such planets like our Earth will easily enter there.

Astronomers have seen the spot for several centuries, and it is a distinctive feature of the planet. Despite the fact that the hurricane has existed for many centuries, it appeared not so long ago (by cosmic standards) and may soon dissolve. Something like the most terrible earthly hurricanes abate. Now the Spot is reduced in size, changes its color. Scientists believe that it may disappear sooner or later, although they do not undertake to predict the timing of the complete disappearance of the phenomenon.

Some experts give a forecast about the complete erasure of the Spot from the face of Jupiter over the next 10-20 years. Be that as it may, even if it disappears, humankind still has high-quality photos of this phenomenon thanks to the Juno probe , launched into space by NASA and made its images in July 2017. Juno photographed Jupiter at the moment of closest approach to him. The level of detail of the pictures is almost unbelievable - in any case, until this point, astronomers did not have such photographs. The distance from which the pictures were taken - only 9010 kilometers. At the time of photographing the device was directly above the spot.

“For hundreds of years, various scientists have been watching him, wondering and discussing the nature of the Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, head of the Juno project at the South-West Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we have the best ever photos of this storm. Analysis of the data, not only the images, will take some time, but it will shed light on the past, present and future of the Big Red Spot. ”

As mentioned above, scientists have been observing the blot for a long time - at least since 1600. The maximum time of the earth hurricane is 31 days. The spot size is 40 thousand kilometers long and 13 thousand wide. By the way, the red color of the stain has not yet received an exhaustive explanation. Perhaps the reason in chemical compounds, the main of which is phosphorus. There are other spots of different colors on the planet.

As for reducing the size of the storm, this has been known since 2015. Then the object was photographed using Wide Field Camera 3 of the Hubble telescope. Reducing the size of the spot is rather slow. So, from 2014 to 2015, its diameter object became the smallest by 240 kilometers. By the way, in the very center of the spot there is a foggy “fiber” that passes through the entire whirlwind. Wind speed in a hurricane is 540 kilometers per hour.



The fact that the BKP (Big Red Spot) may disappear sooner or later is a fact. The fact is that such events in the solar system have already occurred. Neptune once had the same spot; it was photographed by Voyager 2 when it flew nearby. But the spot was gone in 1994, when the Hubble entered service, which began to take detailed pictures of objects in the solar system.

Astronomers do not yet understand what it is that can sustain life in a hurricane for so long (although research on this topic, of course, has been going on for a very long time ). As for the cause of the stain, there are two options. One - the upward flow of gas, which reached the stratosphere of the planet, and turned a whirlwind. If the upward flow reaches a stable layer of the atmosphere here, it spreads horizontally. Well, since Jupiter rotates very quickly, the spread leads to the formation of a vortex. The second option is a jet stream in the atmosphere, which has lost stability. As a result, the wave oscillations began, and after the wave broke up, forming small vortices, which subsequently merged into a single system.

There are several assumptions about the time of the disappearance of the spot. One of them was mentioned above. According to another, expressed by Amy Simon from NASA, the object will disappear after 70 years. The problem is that the stain "does not function as it should, not as we can assume." According to Simon, in 10–20 years, a hurricane may take the form of a circle, and then begin to decline at an accelerated rate.