Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking: Hubble observes the most powerful storm in Solar System

The Hubble space telescope has delivered critical science yet again alongside its counterpart, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has now looked at Jupiter and scoured the ever-changing atmosphere of the gaseous world in our Solar System.

The flying observatory has forecast stormy weather at low northern latitudes on Jupiter and has observed a string of alternating storms forming a vortex street on the planet. It has also been observed that the Great Red Spot is shrinking.

The vortex on Jupiter is a wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like the alternating gears of a machine moving clockwise and counterclockwise.

Nasa said that if the storms get close enough to each other and merge together, they could build an even larger storm, potentially rivaling the current size of the Great Red Spot.

Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot, which is the most powerful storm in the solar system, has actually shrunk to the smallest size it has ever been according to observation records dating back 150 years.

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The Great Red Spot is the king of storms in our solar system. A flyby of the Juno spacecraft helped scientists determine that the storm’s roots extend at least 320 kilometers into Jupiter’s atmosphere. For comparison, a typical tropical cyclone on Earth only extends about 15 kilometers. Astronomers had noted that it was shrinking in size and becoming more circular than oval in observations spanning more than a century.

The images captured by Hubble also showed the icy moon Ganymede transiting the giant planet. The telescope also picked up Io photobombing Jupiter’s multicoloured cloud tops, casting a shadow toward the planet’s western limb.

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The European Space Agency (ESA) said that Jupiter’s weather is driven from the inside out, as more heat percolates up from its interior than it receives from the Sun. This heat indirectly drives color-change cycles in the clouds, like the cycle that’s currently highlighting a system of alternating cyclones and anticyclones.

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