Ever since Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989, the giant dark smudges that appear in the distant planet's atmosphere have presented a strange puzzle.
. The clouds we can detect are fluffy white clouds that appear around the edges, probably as a result of gasses freezing into methane ice crystals as they are lifted up from lower altitudes.
When a large storm vortex appeared in 2018, however, Irwin and his team got to work with another instrument: the Very Large Telescope's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer . MUSE was able to detect the sunlight reflecting off Neptune, and split it into its constituent wavelengths to reconstruct a 3D spectrum of the planet.
Different wavelengths are associated with different altitudes in Neptune's atmosphere, so the researchers were able to work out the altitude of the dark spot. And they found something surprising: it didn't appear to be a"hole" in Neptune's atmosphere after all.
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