Narration Transcript:

Located nearly 500 million miles away, the planet Jupiter is best known for its Great Red Spot.

The spot is really a huge storm… big enough to swallow Earth.

This series of Hubble Space Telescope photos spanning nearly two decades shows the Great Red Spot shrinking to the smallest size ever measured by astronomers.

Scientists do not know why this legendary storm is changing.

NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon and M. Estacion (STScI);
Acknowledgment: C. Go, H. Hammel (Space Science Institute and AURA), and R. Beebe (New Mexico State University);
Science: A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), J. Rogers (University of Cambridge, UK), and M. Wong and I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley)

Publication: May 15, 2014