A mysterious dark spot on the planet Neptune appears from Earth for the first time space

You may have heard of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, but did you know that Neptune also has a great haze? For the first time using a ground-based telescope, astronomers have observed this mysterious formation on the ice giant.

Note recorded in the journal Nature Astronomy This was taken Thursday (24) by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). In Neptune’s atmosphere, scientists noticed a huge dark spot, with an unexpectedly smaller bright spot adjacent to it.

The Neptunian spot was originally discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 and disappeared a few years later. It remains a mystery to this day. “Since the first discovery of the dark spot, I have always wondered what these elusive, short-lived dark features are,” says Patrick Irwin, a professor at the University of Oxford, UK, and lead researcher on the study. statement.

Since the spots are not permanent in Neptune’s atmosphere, astronomers had not studied them in such detail before. But Hubble has discovered several locations in this icy world, including one in the Northern Hemisphere in 2018.

Irwin and his team began studying the dark main feature from Earth using the VLT’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument. Thus, the group was able to split and blur the sunlight reflected from Neptune into its component colors, or wavelengths, and obtain a three-dimensional spectrum.

The spectrum allowed scientists to better determine how high the spot is in the planet’s atmosphere, providing data on the chemical composition of Neptune’s various gaseous layers. This hinted to the team as to why the design appeared dark.

Thus, scientists ruled out the possibility that the dark spots were caused by “cleansing” in the clouds. The new analyzes indicate that these markings are likely the result of darkening of air molecules in a layer below the main visible haze layer, which occurs when ice and haze mix in the gaseous planet’s atmosphere.

“In the process we discovered a rare type of bright deep cloud that had not been identified before, even in space,” adds Michael Wong, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US. States.

The rare cloud appeared as a bright spot next to the larger main spot, and the data indicates that it was at the same atmospheric level as the large dark spot. This indicates that the formation is quite new compared to the small “companion” clouds of methane ice arranged at high altitudes that have been observed previously.

As Wong points out, in the past, this could only be detected by sending spacecraft to Neptune, such as Voyager. Then Hubble allowed remote observations; And now we observe it from Earth. “Technology has finally advanced to allow this on Earth,” he said, jokingly adding, “It might put me out of my job as a Hubble observer!”

Video below Details of the observation of the Neptune dark spot using the VLT. look: