The Great Red Spot Probably Formed in the Early 1800s

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How old is Jupiter's Great Red Spot? How did it form? Researchers used historical accounts and modern supercomputers to find out.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the Solar System’s defining features. It’s a massive storm that astronomers have observed since the 1600s. However, its date of formation and longevity are up for debate. Have we been seeing the same phenomenon all this time? storm that’s larger than Earth. Its wind speeds exceed 400 km/h . It’s an icon that humans have been observing since at least the 1800s, possibly earlier. Its history, along with how it formed, is a mystery.

“Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the largest and longest-lived known vortex of all solar system planets, but its lifetime is debated, and its formation mechanism remains hidden,” the authors write in their paper. The historical record is valuable, but we have different tools at our disposal now. Space telescopes and spacecraft have studied the GRS in ways that would’ve been unimaginable to Cassini and others. NASA’s Voyager 1 captured our first detailed image of the GRS in 1979, when it was just over 9,000,000 km from Jupiter.

Juno also measured the depth of the GRS, something previous efforts couldn’t achieve. Recently, “various instruments on board the Juno mission in orbit around Jupiter have shown that the GRS is shallow and thin when compared to its horizontal dimension, as vertically it is about 500 km long,” explained Sánchez-Lavega.

 

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