Yahoo News Hubble spots mysterious, huge ‘Dark Spot’ forming on Neptune
Scientists are closer to understanding the gigantic ‘Dark Spot’ storms which form on the ice giant Neptune, after the Hubble Space Telescope captured one forming.
NASA’s Voyager 2 captured images of two huge, dark storms brewing in Neptune’s southern hemisphere in 1989 – christened the ‘Dark Spots’.
But Hubble images taken in 1994 showed the storms had vanished.
In 2015, a new team began to analyse images of Neptune – and saw that the birth of one of the mysterious storms had been captured on camera.
While analysing Hubble images of Neptune taken from 2015 to 2017, the team discovered that several small, white clouds formed in the region where the most recent dark spot would later appear.
The high-altitude clouds are made up of methane ice crystals, which give them their characteristic bright, white appearance.
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These companion clouds are thought to hover above the storms, similar to the way that lenticular clouds cap tall mountains on Earth.
Their presence several years before a new storm was spotted suggests that dark spots may originate much deeper in the atmosphere than previously thought.
In 2018, a new dark spot emerged, hovering at 23 degrees north latitude – and its birth was caught on camera.
‘We were so busy tracking this smaller storm from 2015, that we weren’t necessarily expecting to see another big one so soon,’ says Simon about the storm, which is similar in size to the Great Dark Spot. ‘That was a pleasant surprise. Every time we get new images from Hubble, something is different than what we expected.’
