[NASA file image for representation.]
Mumbai: In a first, astronomers have noticed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with a surprisingly smaller bright spot adjacent to it.
The dark spot on Neptune’s atmosphere has been observed with a telescope on Earth.
These rare features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers.
The new results via ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) provide further clues to find out their nature and origin.
The latest astral observation comes days after astronomers noticed cloud coverage seen on Neptune disappearing.
A dark spot was first discovered on Neptune by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989, before disappearing a few years later.
“Since the first discovery of the dark spot, I’ve always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are,” said Patrick Irwin, Professor at the University of Oxford and lead investigator of the study published in Nature Astronomy.
The new observations indicate that dark spots are likely the result of air particles darkening in a layer below the main visible haze layer, as ice and haze mix in Neptune’s atmosphere.
The observations also lead to another surprise result.
“In the process, we discovered a rare deep bright cloud type that had never been identified before, even from space,” said study co-author Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Coming to this conclusion was no easy achievement because dark spots are not permanent features of Neptune’s atmosphere and astronomers had never before been able to study them in sufficient detail.
The opportunity came after the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered several dark spots in Neptune’s atmosphere, including one in the planet’s northern hemisphere first noticed in 2018.
With the help of ESO’s VLT, it is now possible for astronomers to study features like these spots from Earth.
“This is an astounding increase in humanity’s ability to observe the cosmos. At first, we could only detect these spots by sending a spacecraft there, like Voyager. Then we gained the ability to make them out remotely with Hubble. Finally, technology has advanced to enable this from the ground,” concludes Wong, before adding, jokingly: "This could put me out of work as a Hubble observer!”
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