In 2020, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex wider than the Atlantic Ocean on Neptune abruptly steer away from a “likely death” on the giant ice planet, some 30 years after NASA’s Voyager 2 probe flew past in 1989 after a nearly 3-billion-mile odyssey, snapping images of two giant storms brewing in Neptune’s southern hemisphere. NASA scientists dubbed the storms “The Great Dark Spot” and “Dark Spot 2.” Five years later, Hubble revealed both the Great Dark Spot and the smaller Dark Spot 2 had vanished.
Or so they thought
Hubble first observed he formation of a Great Dark Spot on Neptune in 2018. Like Jupiter’s 350-year-old Great Red Spot, Neptune’s Great Dark Spots are storms that form in areas of high atmospheric pressure. Scientists have seen a total of six dark spots on Neptune over the years. Voyager 2 identified two storms in 1989. Since Hubble launched in 1990, it has viewed four more of these storms.
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IMAGE: This Hubble Space Telescope snapshot of the dynamic blue-green planet Neptune reveals a monstrous dark storm (top center) and the emergence of a smaller dark spot nearby (top right). The. view more
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), and L.A. Sromovsky and P.M. Fry (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Astronomers using NASA s Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex on Neptune abruptly steer away from a likely death on the giant blue planet.
The storm, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was born in the planet s northern hemisphere and discovered by Hubble in 2018. Observations a year later showed that it began drifting southward toward the equator, where such storms are expected to vanish from sight. To the surprise of observers, Hubble spotted the vortex change direction by August 2020, doubling back to the north. Though Hubble has tracked similar dark spots over the past 30 years, this unpredictab
Hubble Pins Down Weird Exoplanet with Far-Flung Orbit
A planet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: a hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed Planet Nine.
This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disk. This disk is similar to our Kuiper Belt of small, icy bodies beyond Neptune. In our own solar system, the suspected Planet Nine would also lie far outside of the Kuiper Belt on a similarly strange orbit. Though the search for a Planet Nine continues, this exoplanet discovery is evidence that such oddball orbits are possible.
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