astronomyblog: Neptune’s unexpected bright storm A storm…





astronomyblog:

Neptune’s unexpected bright storm

A storm complex nearly the size of Earth has been seen in a usually quiet area of Neptune. Ned Molter from the University of California, Berkeley in the US spotted the storm while performing a test run of twilight observing at the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The storm system appears as a very bright region about 9000 km in length and spans at least 30° in both latitude and longitude. “Seeing a storm this bright at such a low latitude is extremely surprising,” explains Molter. “Normally, this area is really quiet and we only see bright clouds in the mid-latitude bands, so to have such an enormous cloud sitting right at the equator is spectacular.”

Source: physicsworld.com

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