Could Jupiter lose its spot?

Talk about bad weather. The forecast for Jupiter is a massive storm. That’s the same storm that has been hammering the planet for at least 350 years, as far as we know.

The storm is Jupiter’s famous red spot, an area of high pressure in the South Equatorial Belt that has produced the largest anticyclonic (counter-clockwise) storm in the solar system, with wind speeds up to 268 mph. Inside the spot are extreme acoustic waves that travel upwards for about 500 miles above the storm. In the upper atmosphere, energy from the wave is converted to heat, and temperatures reach 2,420 degrees.

The storm persists because, unlike Earth, Jupiter has no hard surface to slow it down. While it might have a rocky core, it is mainly gases, surrounded by at least 80 moons.

But what if the storm ends? It might happen in the next 20 years. In fact, scientists say the storm that creates Jupiter’s iconic red spot seems to have been getting smaller for a long time. The storm on the giant planet is larger than Earth — about 10,000 miles long — but in the 19th century, it might have been 30,000 miles long. If the storm has been subsiding, that means Jupiter’s iconic spot — that big red blotch — might actually disappear. As you might expect, scientists disagree on that.