Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Behaving Strangely

If on a clear and starry night in mid-May you had trained a high-powered telescope on just the right part of Jupiter, you would have seen something very, very strange. The Great Red Spot, one of our solar system’s most famous features, would have appeared to be slowly unraveling. You would have seen the swirling storm system casting off ribbons of rose-colored gas like petals in the wind. It would have been beautiful.

Earlier this year, dozens of die-hard amateur astronomers across the globe began noticing that the Great Red Spot’s ordinarily ovoid figure looked distorted. By April, it seemed to be shedding red flakes. In May, that flaking grew so extreme that the spot looked as though it might disintegrate.

The amateur community, a tight-knit, he thought, .