Neptune has spawned a dark vortex the size of the United States

NASA

Planet Neptune, as seen in a July 1989 photograph taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2.

The Hubble Space Telescope has just photographed a huge dark mass in the clouds of Neptune, making it the first storm spotted there in more than two decades.

NASA explained in a press release that the find confirmed scientists' suspicions that huge "dark spots" like this one - or the one we discovered in 1989, which nearly 4 times larger across than the entire planet Earth - are "long-lived" features of Neptune's poisonous atmosphere.

The images are a little blurry, but nonetheless fascinating, as well as creepy and ominous.

"Dark vortices coast through the atmosphere like huge, lens-shaped gaseous mountains," astronomer Mike Wong, who analyzed the data, said in the release.

"And the companion clouds... appear as pancake-shaped features lingering over mountains on Earth."

NASA

"Companion clouds" are the bright clouds surrounding the swirling, high-pressure systems that cause the dark spots.

The spots are best seen by blue wavelengths of light, in which case it looks even more scary:

NASA

These spots are probably Neptune's toxic mix of gasses freezing into methane crystals, which means they'd be nearly impossible to form on Earth.

Phew.