New Image of Neptune tagged posts

Hubble Releases a New Image of Neptune, Revealing a Rapidly Shifting Storm

Annotated view of Neptune with two dark spots. Credit: NASAESASTScI, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), and L.A. Sromovsky and P.M. Fry (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Storms on Neptune seem to follow a pattern of forming, strengthening and then dissipating over the course of about two Earth years. But a Neptunian storm spotted in the planet’s atmosphere over two years ago has done something quite different: it has reversed course and is still going strong.

The storm, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, originated in the planet’s northern hemisphere and seen with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. Observations a year later showed that it began drifting southward toward the equator, where previous similar whirling storms went to die...

Read More