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English: Neptune, the eighth and farthest planet from the Sun, was visited for the first and last time by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in 1989. Since then, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been attempting to unearth the myriad mysteries surrounding this cool, majestic behemoth — including deciphering why it has the fastest wind speeds of any planet in the Solar System, and what lies at its centre.

These new Hubble images reveal one of the standout features of Neptune’s strange atmosphere: a rare dark spot, or dark vortex — a whirling high-pressure atmospheric system usually accompanied by bright “companion clouds”. This particular dark spot is named SDS-2015 (Southern Dark Spot discovered in 2015), and is only the fifth observed so far on Neptune. Although it appears to be slightly smaller than previous dark spots, observations of SDS-2015 from 2015 to 2017 revealed that the spot was once big enough to almost swallow China before rapidly diminishing in size.

Each of the five dark spots found on Neptune have been curiously diverse, but all have appeared and disappeared within just a few years — as opposed to similar vortices on Jupiter which evolve over decades. Bright clouds form alongside dark spots when the flow of ambient air is disturbed and diverted upwards over the spot, likely causing gases to freeze into methane ice crystals.

Only Hubble is currently powerful enough to image Neptune’s dark spots, and produce striking images such as these; these views were taken over the course of two years using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
한국어: 1989년 NASA 보이저 2호가 태양에서 여덟 번째이자 가장 먼 행성인 해왕성을 처음이자 마지막으로 방문했다. 그 이후로 NASA/ESA 허블 우주 망원경은 이 멋지고 장엄한 거대 물체를 둘러싼 무수한 미스터리를 파헤치기 위해 노력해 왔습니다. 여기에는 태양계 행성 중 풍속이 가장 빠른 이유와 그 중심에 무엇이 있는지도 포함되어 있습니다. 이 새로운 허블 이미지는 해왕성의 기이한 대기의 두드러진 특징 중 하나를 보여줍니다: 드문 어두운 점 또는 어두운 소용돌이 - 일반적으로 밝은 "동반자 구름"이 동반되는 소용돌이 치는 고압 대기 시스템.이 특정 흑점은 SDS-2015(2015년에 발견된 남부 흑점)로 명명되었으며 지금까지 해왕성에서 다섯 번째로 관찰되었습니다. 이전의 흑점보다 약간 작은 것처럼 보이지만 2015년부터 2017년까지 SDS-2015를 관찰한 결과 그 반점은 한때 중국을 거의 삼킬 정도로 컸던 것으로 나타났습니다.
Date
Source http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1808a/
Author NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and A.I. Hsu (UC Berkeley)

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