Storm on Neptune
For the first time ever, astronomers have witnessed the birth of one of Neptune's enormous "Great Dark Spot" storms.
Astronomers were studying Hubble Space Telescope images of a relatively small Neptune maelstrom that formed in 2015 when they noticed bright white clouds forming in a different locale on the ice giant. By 2018, a dark storm as wide as Earth had boiled up in that region, the researchers announced in a study published today (March 25) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"We were so busy tracking this smaller storm from 2015 that we weren't necessarily expecting to see another big one so soon," study lead author Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
The find brings the total tally of observed Great Dark Spots on Neptune to six. The first two such disturbances were detected by NASA's Voyager 2 probe during its Neptune flyby in August 1989, which provided the first up-close look at the mysterious blue planet. Hubble discovered the other four spots.
Indeed, Hubble imagery has been key in characterizing these dramatic, otherworldly storms. For example, photos captured by the space telescope in 1994 revealed that the two tempests seen by Voyager 2 had dissipated, revealing that Great Dark Spots don't last very long, at least by giant-planet standards.
We were used to looking at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which presumably had been there for more than 100 years.
Source- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/dark-storm-on-neptune-reverses-direction-possibly-shedding-a-fragment/
