The Mystery of Neptune’s Great Dark Spot
In 2020, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex wider than the Atlantic Ocean on Neptune abruptly steer away from a “likely death” on the giant ice planet, some 30 years after NASA’s Voyager 2 probe flew past in 1989 after a nearly 3-billion-mile odyssey, snapping images of two giant storms brewing in Neptune’s southern hemisphere. NASA scientists dubbed the storms “The Great Dark Spot” and “Dark Spot 2.” Five years later, Hubble revealed both the Great Dark Spot and the smaller Dark Spot 2 had vanished.