New Hubble images show Jupiter’s Great Red Spot wiggles like gelatin
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New observations of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot captured by the Hubble Space Telescope show that the 190-year-old storm wiggles like gelatin and shape-shifts like a squeezed stress ball.
The unexpected observations, which Hubble took over 90 days from December to March, show that the Great Red Spot isn’t as stable as it appears, according to astronomers.
The Great Red Spot, or GRS, is an anticyclone, or a large circulation of winds in Jupiter’s atmosphere that rotates around a central area of high pressure along the planet’s southern midlatitude cloud belt. And the long-lived storm is so large — the biggest in the solar system — that Earth could fit inside it.
Although storms are generally considered unstable, the Great Red Spot has persisted for nearly two centuries. But the observed changes in the storm appear related to its motion and size.
