Jupiter's Great Red Spot may not last long!!!

[LongTomH]

Business Insider: Jupiter's Great Red Spot may have only 10 to 20 years left before it dies:

Jupiter's super-storm is wider than Earth and has been swirling around since perhaps the 1600s. By comparison, Earth's longest recorded storm, Hurricane John in 1994, lasted just 31 days.

Business Insider asked Glenn Orton— a lead Juno mission team member and planetary scientist at NASA JPL — why Jupiter's storms last so long.

"They don't, at least not all of them," Orton said in an email. "Think of the GRS [Great Red Spot] as a spinning wheel that keeps on spinning because it's caught between two conveyor belts that are moving in opposite directions. The GRS is stable and long-lived, because it's 'wedged' between two jet streams that are moving in opposite directions."

............//snip

But Orton said the Great Red Spot, and other long-lived storms on Jupiter, still won't go on forever.

"In truth, the GRS has been shrinking for a long time," he said.

In the late 1800s, the storm was perhaps as wide as 30 degrees longitude, Orton said. That works out to more than 35,000 miles — four times the diameter of Earth. When the nuclear-powered spacecraft Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter in 1979, however, the storm had shrunk to a bit more twice the width of our own planet.

"Now it's something like 13 degrees wide in longitude and only 1.3 times the size of the Earth," he said. "Nothing lasts forever."

The Great Red Spot compared to Earth

[Wounded Bear]

1. Thanks for the link...nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thank you. n/t