Is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Disappearing?

A large red eye has been observed on Jupiter for centuries: the Great Red Spot (GRS). Great Red Spot) is the oldest and largest storm in the Solar System. It’s a mysterious (but fascinating) atmospheric detail that, despite our best efforts, we still struggle to fully understand. Even now his future may be uncertain.

The discovery of the Mancha

At the beginning of the 17th century, Galileo Galilei raised a telescope towards the king of the planets in the Solar System for the first time in history, discovering the four Galilean moons. Later, it was Gian Domenico Cassini who first reported the existence of a “permanent spot” in Jupiter’s atmosphere. He observed it until 1712, the year of his death. We’re not sure it was the real Great Red Spot, it could have been another one that disappeared later. But if it were, it would mean that almost four centuries have passed since the Great Storm began to destroy Jupiter’s clouds. If not, at least two centuries have passed, because in 1831 it was drawn by the German Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, the man who discovered the sunspot cycle that bears his name.

In 1878 Carr Walter Pritchett described it in detail, and from then on he never lost sight of it again. The big leap came, of course, in the space age, when we saw and studied it with the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes in 1974 and with the two Voyager probes in 1979. Later, with the Hubble space telescope in the early 90s, with the Galileo probe at the turn of the millennium, with Cassini that flew over Jupiter before heading towards Saturn and, currently, with the Juno probe and the James Space Telescope Webb. In short, Jupiter’s Great Storm has been attracting our attention for a long time.