Formation of Dark Vortex on Neptune Captured For the Very First Time
But like the Great Red Spot, the dark vortices on Neptune emerge in areas of high pressure, whereas storms on Earth form in areas of low pressure. Amy Simon, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who leads the OPAL mission, along with Michael Wong and Andrew Hsu from the University of California Berkeley, were studying Hubble images of Neptune’s prior dark vortex, which emerged in 2015, when they noticed small, bright clouds in the area where the 2018 spot would eventually emerge. Writing in the new Geophysical Research Letters paper, Simon and her colleagues said the associated clouds appeared at the same location about two years before the new dark spot emerged—an important clue suggesting the storms originate much deeper within the planet’s atmosphere than is typically assumed.
Source: gizmodo.com