Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is an anomaly with no known equal in our solar system. The powerful anticyclone churns beneath the planet’s equator, where it produces winds estimated at between 270 and 425 mph. While it has shrunk in recent decades (to just a bit wider than Earth), it’s probably not going anywhere soon.
The spot has marked Jupiter since at least 1831, when amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe first observed the storm.
