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The mighty Jupiter draws a lot of attention for his ever-changing face, but it's not the only planet in our solar system to have a serious personality. Neptune, the big ball of frozen methane and various other icy gases that lie outside our system, is surprisingly active, and the Hubble Space Telescope just surprised him doing something no one had ever seen before. .
Astronomers have known for a long time that the surface of Neptune is punctuated by black dots. These large discolorations in its atmosphere can be linked to areas of high pressure and they come and go over several years, but no one had ever seen a formation form so far.
In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists explain how they spotted one of Neptune's 'Large black spots' growing. Originally, the team focused on the types of clouds that began to emerge well before the formation of the dark spot, ultimately suggesting that the dark spots come from the depth of the atmosphere of the planet rather than the surface where they were observed.
This is only the latest in what has been a steady stream of new developments regarding Neptune's atmosphere. Originally observed in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, the first dark spots on planets discovered by scientists had completely disappeared by the time Hubble was launched half a decade later, leaving astronomers scratching their heads.
Not knowing what to think of it, the researchers began to observe Neptune more regularly, possibly spotting several other dark spots that came and went with regularity. It now seems that scientists know better when and where one of the great vortices will form and this discovery could help to better understand how and why they are emerging in the near future.
Source of image: NASA
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