Cosmetologist/Astrologer here. That is wildly speculative. (Destiny)

by Funkmon , Monday, April 20, 2015, 02:38 (3595 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Funkmon, Monday, April 20, 2015, 02:42

No astronomer I know of actually thinks this will happen, just that it is possible.

We've been watching this thing since Kepler pretty much uninterrupted. While it is a mystery to us exactly why it continues, new research and computer modeling indicates it has something to do with vertical winds and gases keeping the storm stable. Initially, scientists thought it continued to gain energy by sucking up smaller vortices. This doesn't explain its current longevity, but the vertical winds keep it running in mathematical models potentially indefinitely. Because of this, many astronomers saw no reason to buy into the 2030 thing from 2014 that you're talking about.

Considering we know not what mechanism exactly keeps it going, we cannot predict anything. The idea that it will be gone by 2030 is due to extrapolation of trends found in very recent years using a straight linear regression best fit line on the data. We haven't really had very good measurements of the red spot for more than 70 years, and in its cartoonishly long lifespan, that is nothing. Right now, it's shrunken from times in living memory of many of our forumgoers. I show students every week the red spot, or bright pink spot, as I call it, and it is pretty small, much smaller than photos from around Pioneer's time...but this doesn't necessarily mean anything. See photos. Guess which is which.

This may be a normal ebb and flow of the red spot, or it might actually be leaving. We don't really know, and all the astronomers, even the ones mentioned in the press releases touting this attention grabbing headline, say they don't really know, just that it's possible.