Neptune has never had a special space mission, but the Hubble Space Telescope is still shedding new light on the workings of the mysterious planet.
Driving the news: A new photo from the space telescope shows a protracted storm – the dark spot in the top center – that was first observed in 2018 and is still going strong.
- Scientists expected the big, dark storm to disappear because they saw it move towards the planet’s equator, where storms like these usually fade.
- However, the new Hubble observations show that the dark spot – which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean – unexpectedly moved back above the equator.
The intrigue: Hubble also found a smaller, dark storm in the planet’s atmosphere in January. Scientists suspect it may be a broken off piece of the larger storm.
- “It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped moving and started moving north again,” Michael Wong of the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement. “Maybe getting rid of that fragment was enough to keep it from going to the equator.”