Neptune has never had a dedicated space mission, but the Hubble Space Telescope is still shedding new light on the workings of the mysterious planet.
Leading the news: A new photo from the space telescope shows a long-lived storm, the dark spot in the upper center, which was first observed in 2018 and still lasts.
- Scientists expected the big, dark storm to disappear because they saw it advancing toward the planet’s equator, where such storms often disappear.
- However, new Hubble observations show that the dark spot, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, moved over the equator unexpectedly.
The plot: Hubble’s January also found a smaller dark storm in the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists suspect it could be a major storm break.
- “It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped moving and began moving north again,” Michael Wong of the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement. “Perhaps dumping this fragment was enough to prevent it from moving toward the equator.”