Neptune has never had a dedicated space mission,but the Hubble Space Telescope is still shedding new light on the workings of the mysterious planet.
Driving the news: A new photo from the space telescope shows a long-lived storm — the dark spot in the upper center — first spotted in 2018 still going strong.
Scientists expected the large, dark storm would disappear because they saw it moving toward the planet's equator, where these types of storms usually fade.
However, the new Hubble observations show the dark spot — which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean — moved back above the equator unexpectedly.
The intrigue: The Hubble also found a smaller, dark storm in the planet's atmosphere in January. Scientists suspect it might be a broken-off bit of the larger storm.
"It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped its motion and started moving northward again," Michael Wong of the University of California at Berkeley, said in a statement. "Maybe by shedding that fragment, that was enough to stop it from moving towards the equator."
