Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking, but that does not necessarily mean that it is dying.

Earlier this year, amateur astronomers caught the red spot seemingly starting to fall apart, with rose-colored clouds breaking away from the storm that is some 15,000 miles wide. In May, giant streamers of gas appeared to be peeling from the spot’s outer rim, blown into the winds circling the planet.

The spot — which is red for reasons not fully understood — has become smaller in recent decades. Some Jupiter-watchers wondered if they were witnessing the beginning of the Great Red Spot’s end.

“We beg to differ with that conclusion,” Philip S. Marcus, a professor of fluid mechanics at the University of California, Berkeley said on Monday during a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s division of fluid dynamics in Seattle . In essence, Dr. Marcus said, the odd dynamics in the spot are just the result of weather on Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet.