New Scientist reports: [edited]
Jupiter's third giant red storm has been chewed up by a collision with the planet's other two red spots and does not appear to have survived.
Astronomers are still scrambling to capture pictures of the aftermath, but it appears Jupiter's third spot was torn up last week when it squeezed between its larger cousins, the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Junior. The third spot first appeared earlier this year when a white storm turned scarlet.
On Wednesday, traces of clumpy red material seemed to have survived, although "it's not really a spot any more", Glenn Orton at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, said. "It's just sort of scrambled. It's a blob."
Jupiter's spots are massive, hurricane-like storms. The Great Red Spot, which is three times the diameter of Earth, has been raging for at least 340 years. Red Spot Jr, also known as Oval BA, turned red in 2006.
The third red spot had been moving toward the Great Red Spot, but its ill-fated positioning between the two other spots came as a surprise. "I didn't think it would get mashed between two of the largest storms in the solar system," Orton told New Scientist. "That's not something anyone anticipated."
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