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Before and after of Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrinking over 10 years, natural or something else?
I saw a side by side photo comparison from 2014 and 2024 of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The spot is visibly smaller in the recent photo, like a third less wide. Some people say it's just a natural cycle Jupiter goes through every few decades. Others think it might be linked to changes in the planet's internal heat or weather patterns we don't fully understand yet. Which side do you lean on, natural cycle or something more unusual going on deep in the atmosphere?
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cole_murphy7d ago
Dude, that third less wide stat hit me different too. I've actually been watching this spot for years with a cheap telescope I got, and @the_claire is totally right, it's not just a tiny tweak. From my own backyard views, the shrinkage has been super obvious since like 2020. Honestly, I lean toward it being mostly natural cycle stuff. Jupiter's got these massive bands of gas that shift around over decades, so the spot probably just got swallowed up by some of those currents. But I won't lie, the speed of the change does make you wonder if there's some deeper heat shift happening down there we can't see. Best advice I've got is to keep checking the raw images from the Juno mission each month, you can literally watch it shrink in real time.
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the_claire8d ago
Wait, a third less wide? That's way more shrinkage than I thought, I figured it was just a little bit smaller not basically losing a whole chunk of itself.
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Hold on, a third less wide? That is a lot more than I figured too. I thought we were talking maybe 10-15 percent, not basically chopping off a whole dang slab of the thing. You're telling me if something was 12 inches across, now it's only 8? That's a massive difference you'd notice right away, not some little tweak. Man, that changes everything I thought about the size of the new one.
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