Red Spot of Jupiter sinking 2014

Jupiter’s monster storm, the Great Red Spot, was once so large that three Earths would fit inside it. But new measurements by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the largest storm in our solar system has downsized significantly.............

The red spot, which has been raging for at least a hundred years, is only the width of one Earth. What is happening? One possibility is that some unknown activity in the planet’s atmosphere may be draining energy and weakening the storm, causing it to shrink. The Hubble images were taken in 1995, 2009, and 2014

Jupiter’s trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling anticyclonic storm feature larger than Earth — has shrunken to the smallest size ever measured. Astronomers have followed this downsizing since the 1930s

“Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the Great Red Spot (GRS) is now approximately 10,250 miles across, the smallest diameter we’ve ever measured,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged the GRS to be as big as 25,500 miles on its long axis. The NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys of Jupiter in 1979 measured the GRS to be 14,500 miles across.........