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“In truth, the GRS has been shrinking for a long time,” Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Business Insider. The storm was once as large as four times the diameter of Earth, but more recent observations have shown that it’s rapidly losing steam. “Now it’s something like 13 degrees wide in longitude and only 1.3 times the size of the Earth,” Orton says. “Nothing lasts forever.” Late last year, Juno revealed some surprising information about the huge storm, including how deep into the planet it goes. The data showed that the storm is up to 100 times deeper...

Like Jupiter, Neptune has a giant spinning mystery. NASA's Hubble Telescope captured a time-lapse of the storm for the first time and found a surprising conclusion—it is shrinking. Officially called a "dark vortex," the Neptunian storm shares a few properties with Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS). Like the GRS, a dark vortex is moving in a anti-cyclonic direction that sweeps up material from the planet's icy atmosphere. “We have no evidence of how these vortices are formed or how fast they rotate,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega from the University of the Basque Country in Spain in a NASA press statement. “It...

Scientists used to think that things were pretty chill over in the south hemisphere of Uranus. In fact, they thought it was one of the calmest regions of any of the gas giants. But in analyzing images taken nearly three decades ago by NASA's Voyager-2 spacecraft, researchers think they've found a kerfuffle of activity — which might indicate that there's something unusual about the planet's interior. If you look at these old photos of Uranus, the planet appears to be a stark, featureless ball. And even to scientists, who were able to identify more lively features of the gas giant,...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 13 WIRO at Jupiter Credit: A. Kutyrev (SSAI/GSFC), D. Rapchun(GST/GSFC), J. Norris(NASA/GSFC) R. Canterna & R. Martin (U Wyoming) Explanation: Gazing out over the mountaintops from the Wyoming InfraRed Observatory (WIRO), astronomers recently recorded this bizarre looking image of the solar system's ruling planet, gas giant Jupiter. The false-color picture is a composite of images taken to test a sophisticated digital camera operating at liquid helium...