The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the birth of one of Neptune’s mysterious short-lived storms, which can grow to be larger than planet Earth before dying out in a matter of years.
Giant storms dubbed the Great Dark Spot and Dark Spot 2 were first observed on Neptune in 1989 during the Voyager 2 flyby.
But, when Hubble attempted to take a look at the same features just five years later, in 1994, both of the massive storms were gone.
Though similar storms observed on other planets are thought to persist for upwards of 100 years, such as Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, recent observations suggest storms crop up on Neptune roughly every five years and survive for about as long.
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Giant storms dubbed the Great Dark Spot (pictured on right, seen at the center of the planet) and Dark Spot 2 were first observed on Neptune in 1989 during the Voyager 2 flyby. More recently, NASA spotted bright white methane clouds sitting above another spot (left)
When scientists directed Hubble toward Neptune’s large storms in the 1990s, they never expected they would no longer be there.
‘It was certainly a surprise,’ said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
‘We were used to looking at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which presumably had been there for more than a hundred years.’
To further investigate, the Outer Planet Atmosphere Legacy (OPAL) project has been analyzing Hubble’s Neptune images on a yearly basis since 2015, tracking a small storm in the southern hemisphere.
But last year, they spotted a new dark spot just north of the equator. The team says it's roughly the same size as the Great Dark Spot, which grew to about 13,000 kilometers by 6,600 km (approximately 8,000 miles by 4,100 miles).
‘We were so busy tracking this smaller storm from 2015, that we weren’t necessarily expecting to see another big one so soon,’ Simon said.
‘That was a pleasant surprise. Every time we get new images from Hubble, something is different than we expected.’
The team looked back on the images captured between 2015 and 2017 and discovered small white clouds in the region where the
