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Thursday April 2, 2009
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Notice anything different about Jupiter in your telescope lately? Astronomers have observed that one of Jupiter's most recognizable features, the Great Red Spot, has been shrinking since the mid 1990s, according to CNN. The Great Red Spot is actually a giant, persistent, seemingly eternal storm that's about the same size across as three complete Earths. But astronomers have noted that since 1996, the spot has lost about 15 percent of its size.
Xylar Asay-Davis, a postdoctoral researcher who was part of the study, said in the article that it measures up to a shrinkage of about one kilometer (about 0.6 miles) per day during that time period. While the shrinking size of the GRS isn't news, the report said that
this research focused on the motion of the storm--which produced much
more reliable measurements.
The group even developed software that tracked the
movement of the spot's cloud patterns over long periods of time.
"It's not just the motion of the spot as a whole object. Within it, it
has a very complicated swirl to it -- sort of a thin ring on the
outside and then a sort of quiet area in the center -- and that shape
of it has been changing over time," Asay-Davis said.
"What we
actually look at is where the winds are the strongest in the vortex.
It's the ring where they're the strongest, and that ring has been
shrinking over time." (Image credit: NASA/JPL)
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April 2, 2009 11:42 PM
Er... global warming?
April 3, 2009 7:36 AM
Hi, Jamie--
When I got started in amateur astronomy around 1973, the Great Red Spot was an easy object, even in the smallest telescopes. My department-store 2.4-inch refractor would show it, and I did a series of drawings of the planet a couple years later with a slightly larger scope, in which the Red Spot played a prominent role. Now I haven't seen it for many years in scopes I've had up to 5 inches in aperture. They say the trick to finding it is to look, rather than for the spot itself, for the indentation it makes in Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt.
--Tony
April 3, 2009 8:35 PM
Shades of 2010, Space oddasy
April 6, 2009 7:02 AM
Shrinking great red spot, cooling on earth, cooling on mars, cooling on venus... hmm. Solar minimum? Na... man-caused CO2 emissions must be to blame!
Can I sell you some carbon credits?