With the aid of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers witnessed a mysterious dark vortex on the surface of Neptune abruptly steer away from its charted course toward the planet’s equator.
The colossal storm, which is located on the planet’s northern hemisphere, was originally discovered by Hubble in 2018, Phys.org reports.
Observations last year revealed that the giant vortex was slowly drifting southward toward Neptune’s equator, where it was expected to vanish from sight. According to NASA’s website, storms on Neptune disintegrate as they approach the planet’s equator because their Coriolis effect weakens at lower latitudes.
New Hubble images reveal that the storm inexplicably and abruptly changed its course toward the equator and began doubling back northward.
“It was really exciting to see this one act like it’s supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back,” Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley stated (via Phys.org). “That was surprising.”
Over Hubble’s 30 years of tracking dark spots on Neptune, this marks the first time a storm has changed course in such a way. To complicate the phenomenon even further, the storm has a little brother that’s exhibiting the exact same behavior.
The space telescope spotted a smaller dark spot in January positioned to the northeast of the colossal storm. Some astronomers are speculating that the smaller storm may have once been a part of the larger storm that broke off and drifted away. The space telescope’s official twitter account posted an image of the two storms on Dec. 15.