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Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot detected from Earth for the first time

There are four telescopic images of the planet Neptune side-by-side. The rightmost one is an almost-featureless cyan disc with a faint dark spot to the upper-right. The other three, coloured in blue, green and red, show higher contrast views of dark and bright spots, as well as bands crossing the planet diagonally.

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

Large spots are common features in the atmospheres of giant planets, the most famous being Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. On Neptune, a dark spot was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989, before disappearing a few years later...

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