NASA's Hubble captures new dark spot on Neptune!

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and J Tollefson (UC Berkeley)

New Delhi: The US space agency NASA recently released a new image of Neptune with a dark feature that resides near and below a patch of bright clouds in the planet's southern hemisphere.

The image was captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on May 16, 2016 and confirm the presence of a dark vortex in the atmosphere of Neptune.

Similar features were seen during the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 and by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, this vortex is the first one observed on Neptune in the 21st century.

As per NASA, Neptune's dark vortices are high-pressure systems and are usually accompanied by bright "companion clouds," which are also now visible on the distant planet. The bright clouds form when the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the dark vortex, causing gases to likely freeze into methane ice crystals.