Jupiter's Great Red Spot is Shrinking

[steven johnson]

Fluid dynamics of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a mystery but it is a thing of gigantic beauty. It is changing.

April 02, 2009 3:47 PM
The atmosphere of Jupiter is a swirling, violent, ever-changing brew of gases, but for 300 years astronomers have puzzled over the Great Red Spot -- a giant cyclone (actually an anti-cyclone, since the pressure in it appears higher than the surrounding atmosphere) that has been visible in telescopes for all of the 400 years since telescopes were first pointed at it.

Now a team from Berkeley reports that it's been shrinking, ten percent over the last decade, roughly at a rate of a kilometer a day.... Like hurricanes on earth, it is a vortex, like a gargantuan version of the little spiral that forms as water drains from a bathtub

Philip S. Marcus, a professor of fluid mechanics who is on the Berkeley team.  "My guess is that the 'food supply' of vortices has been reduced."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2009/04/the-great-red-s.html

[Hannah Bell]

1. inter-galactic warming.

[nxylas]

2. I'm sure the deniers are going to jump on this

Just like they jumped on the story about climate change on Mars's poles over a period of a few years.

[Itchinjim]

3. "The monolith...

it's full of stars!"

[HysteryDiagnosis]

4. You can't trust telescopes. I'm sure most of the ones we are

using now were made in the R.O.C.

[Deja Q]

5. I'm sure Jupiter's moons took some Zovirax, put it on the red spot, and the cold sore is subsiding

[lapfog_1]

6. Possible after affect of Shoemaker-Levy 9 ??? - n/t

[Posteritatis]

7. Those hit nowhere near the GRS, and would be a pinprick to Jupiter anyway (nt)

[FiveGoodMen]

8. Which makes it funny that there were predictions that effects of the impact would be felt on earth

The Cure had a song called 'The Jupiter Crash' that complained about what a disappointing non-event it turned out to be.

[Posteritatis]

9. Predictions by anyone other than woohead astrologers? (nt)

[FiveGoodMen]

10. Mostly news personalities and local clubs that gathered to watch it.

[lapfog_1]

11. Not exactly pinpricks...

Anything that can strike a planet the size of Jupiter and have those strikes be visible can't be accurately described as a "pinprick"

As for affecting the GRS, I was thinking that the strikes might have affected the upper layers of a wide swath of the atmosphere (at a certain latitude, just as a smaller asteroid strike on earth would eject enough material to affect our atmosphere). Years later, those changes in "climate" might
cause the GRS to either grow or shrink as the "steady state" of the atmosphere was disturbed. Sort of like a bigger version of a "butterfly effect" only
with a pretty sizable impact from a comet instead of the butterfly.

The comet strike is the only "large" external event in the last few centuries (since we've been able to look at the GRS), at least that we know of.

I still think it's a possibility worth considering.

[Random_Australian]

12. Note please: 'Butterfly effect' is independent of the initial size.

That is what it is known for.

I also note that we don't actually know a lot about the Jovian atmosphere, last I looked. This would imply that you can't do more than speculate, but I could be wrong.