Jupiter’s surface looks striped, painted with swirling bands of orange and white. Spinning in the middle of one of those bands is the most famous storm in the solar system: the Great Red Spot. It’s a hurricane the size of an entire planet, and it has been raging for at least 400 years.
The earliest confirmed observations of it date back to 1665, when astronomers using the first powerful telescopes spotted a weird oval shape on Jupiter. They couldn’t have known what they were looking at, but the storm hasn’t stopped since. Winds inside it whip around at 400 miles per hour, and the eye of the storm is wide enough to swallow Earth whole.
The Great Red Spot has been slowly shrinking over the past century. In the 1800s it was twice as wide as Earth. Today it’s only about 10% bigger. Astronomers aren’t sure why it’s getting smaller, or what fuels the storm at all - it’s a Jupiter mystery that has lasted longer than most countries.
