A New Dark Vortex on Neptune

An outburst of cloud activity on Neptune in 2015 led to speculation about whether the clouds were convective in nature, a wave phenomenon, or bright companions to an unseen dark vortex (similar to the Great Dark Spot studied in detail by Voyager 2). The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) finally answered this question by discovering a new dark vortex at 45 degrees south planetographic latitude, named SDS-2015 for southern dark spot discovered in 2015. SDS-2015 is only the fifth dark vortex ever seen on Neptune. In this paper, we report on imaging of SDS-2015 using HST's Wide Field Camera 3 across four epochs: 2015 September, 2016 May, 2016 October, and 2017 October. We find that the size of SDS-2015 did not exceed 20 degrees of longitude, more than a factor of two smaller than the Voyager dark spots, but only slightly smaller than previous northern-hemisphere dark spots. A slow (1.7-2.5 deg/year) poleward drift was observed for the vortex. Properties of SDS-2015 and its surroundings suggest that the meridional wind shear may be twice as strong at the deep level of the vortex as it is at the level of cloud-tracked winds. Over the 2015-2017 period, the dark spot's contrast weakened from about -7% to about -3%, while companion clouds shifted from offset to centered, a similar evolution to some historical dark spots. The properties and evolution of SDS-2015 highlight the diversity of Neptune's dark spots and the need for faster cadence dark spot observations in the future.