Posts Tagged ‘Great Red Spot’

Great Red Spot becoming less so

According to a recently published study by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, the famous Great Red Spot of Jupiter is shrinking.

From the CNN article:

The spot, which is actually an ancient monster storm that measures about three Earths across, lost 15 percent of its diameter between 1996 and 2006, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found.

It shrank by about 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) a day during that time period, said Xylar Asay-Davis, a postdoctoral researcher who was part of the study.

I see two possible interpretations of this data.

  1. This shitty economy is having even more of an impact than we thought; or
  2. That ointment Dr. Steinberg prescribed to Jupiter back in ’96 really works.