Neptune continues to grow massive bright and dark spots, and scientists don’t know why
Astronomers have noticed a huge and mysterious dark spot on the surface of the planet Neptune from Earth for the first time, and discovered a mysterious bright counterpart nearby.
While scientists still don’t understand the origins of this mysterious patch on the distant ice giant’s blue surface, new observations made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) can help shed some light on this puzzling Neptuneian feature.
dark spot on Neptune It was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 when it flew by the eighth planet far from the sun on its way out of the solar system. The dark spots on the surface of the planets were already familiar to astronomers. Since the nineteenth century, they have been studying Jupiter.big red spotThe dark spot on Neptune was strange, however, because it disappeared after the Voyager 2 observations. Then, in 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope detected several new Neptune dark spots in each From the southern and northern hemispheres of the planet.
Related: All of Neptune’s clouds have mysteriously disappeared, and perhaps the sun is to blame
This piqued the interest of an Oxford University professor Patrick Irwin, who led a team to explore Neptune with the VLT’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), focusing on a location in the planet’s northern hemisphere. In doing so, the researchers hope to dismiss the previously proposed explanation that the dark spots are caused by the evacuation of clouds above the ice giant’s frozen surface.
“The dark spots are very large, 6,200 to 9,300 miles (10,000 to 15,000 km) in diameter and very mysterious,” said Irwin, lead author of a paper published in the journal. Sciences, Tell Live Science via email. “When Voyager 2 spotted the Great Dark Spot, there was some speculation that it might be similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, but we now know that the dark spots of Neptune are very different. In addition to seeing a dark spot from Earth, we also detected a deep, bright spot, called DBS- 2019, next to the dark spot, which has not been seen before.”
Still in the dark about Neptune ‘spots’
The team used MUSE to measure the reflected light, broken down into component colours, from the Neptune dark patch, and found that the patch is no darker than the surrounding regions due to the dense clouds above it.
Instead, it’s because particles at this level of the atmosphere are themselves much darker, and they emit light with wavelengths of 700 nanometers, which is roughly red in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The spot that the astronomers saw, which is at the same level as the dark spot in the atmosphere, was not present in observations of Neptune made a few weeks before MUSE collected its data, and this seems to imply that it is a short spot. feature lived.
“The fact that it is so close to the dark spot is interesting and suggests some association, although what that association is is not known,” Irwin explained.
Researchers aren’t yet sure what causes the dark spots on Neptune, but Irwin said they can put forward some viable hypotheses about the origins of these mysterious spots.
“We suggest that the cause is the addition of dark particles from below,” Irwin said. An alternative theory is that UV light It causes local heating, which converts the hydrogen sulfide ice directly from a solid to a gas, releasing an even darker haze into Neptune’s atmosphere. “We need more observations as well as more dynamical models to figure out what’s going on here,” Irwin added.
Being able to see such features from Earth represents a huge step forward in planetary astronomy, but Irwin and the team now intend to look even deeper with an instrument located just off our planet’s surface. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
“We are also part of a team formed to analyze recent observations of Neptune made with the James Webb Space Telescope,” he concluded. “I can’t wait to see this data!”
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