What is it about?
Neptune receives only a tenth of a percent of the sunlight Earth receives, and yet it has active weather. This article describes Hubble observations of cloud changes occurring over a two-Neptune-day span, including clouds that are thought to mark the location of a long-lived high-pressure storm a Great Dark Spot, similar to the one Voyager discovered in 1989.
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Why is it important?
The clouds on Neptune are so bright that they can be tracked from Earth with powerful telescopes like Hubble, and because clouds are sensitive to perturbations, this provides a valuable handle on the planet's weather.
Perspectives
The ice giants Neptune and Uranus turn out be more representative of the types of planets being discovered around other stars than are Jupiter and Saturn, which increases the importance of studies like this.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Neptune's Atmospheric Circulation and Cloud Morphology: Changes Revealed by 1998 HST Imaging, Icarus, April 2001, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1006/icar.2000.6574.
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