Neptune's Secrets Are Finally Being Unraveled

Scientists have detected a mysterious dark spot on Neptune from Earth for the first time, amid a string of recent discoveries about the ice giant's unusual atmosphere.

Neptune is one of the least explored planet's in our solar system. It is the eighth in our solar system, at a distance of roughly 2.8 billion miles away from our sun. The planet is four times wider than the Earth and is mostly made up of a dense fluid of icy material, around a small, rocky core.

Only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has ever visited the distant planet and no spacecraft has ever orbited it at length to study it up close. As a result, there is a lot about Neptune that we still do not know.

A dark spot was first seen on Neptune by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1989. But, just a few years later, it had disappeared.

"Since the first discovery of a dark spot, I've always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are," Patrick Irwin, a professor at the University of Oxford in the U.K. and lead investigator of a new study published on August 24 in Nature Astronomy, said in a statement.

To investigate this unusual feature, Irwin and his team used data from the European Southern Observatory's creatively named Very Large Telescope to observe the spot from Earth for the first time ever. This was no easy feat considering the dark spots have been known to disappear in the past.

"I'm absolutely thrilled to have been able to[...]make the first detection of a dark spot from the ground," Irwin said.

From this data, the team were able to conclude that the dark spots are most likely the result of darkening air particles in a layer below the bright haze on the atmosphere's surface.

Thanks to advances in telescope technology, researchers are finally getting closer to solving the mysteries of Neptune's atmosphere. "This is an astounding increase in humanity's ability to observe the cosmos," Michael Wong, co-author on the recent study, said in a statement.

"At first, we could only detect these spots by sending a spacecraft there, like Voyager. Then we gained the ability to make them out remotely with Hubble. Finally, technology has advanced to enable this from the ground," concludes Wong.

This discovery comes days after U.S. researchers found an association between the Neptune's fluctuating cloud cover and its solar cycle.

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