11/14/2023 0 Comments Neptunes inside![]() Telescopes reveal why Neptune is more blue than Uranus NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft captured these views of Uranus (on the left) and Neptune (on the right) during its flybys of the planets in the 1980s. The instrument allows astronomers to observe the entirety of an astronomical object all at once in different wavelengths of light, according to the European Southern Observatory. When Hubble discovered new dark spots on Neptune in 2018, Irwin’s team seized its chance to conduct Earth-based observations with the Very Large Telescope and its Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument, or MUSE. It’s the most distant planet in our solar system, about 30 times father from the sun than Earth is, and this distance makes noon on Neptune look like twilight on Earth. Neptune, which has a blue hue due to the methane in its atmosphere, is a frozen world with an average temperature of minus 392 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 degrees Celsius) and screaming winds that send frozen methane clouds across the planet at 1,200 miles per hour (1,931 kilometers per hour). What Irwin and his team sought to find out is how these massive storms on Neptune form in the first place. The dark spots are high-pressure systems that start out stable and rotate clockwise, while hurricanes in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere are low-pressure systems that rotate counterclockwise. Neptune’s storms behave differently than hurricanes on Earth. The Great Dark Spot on Neptune, the nickname given to the largest storm witnessed by Voyager 2, was so large that it could contain Earth. Voyager 2, a NASA probe launched in the 1970s, also glimpsed two dark storms on Neptune during its 1989 flyby of the planet, but those disappeared well before Hubble could observe them when it captured images of Neptune in 1994. The storms all seem to follow a pattern of appearing and disappearing over the course of two years, making them difficult to study. Neptune, an ice giant, has had multiple storms observed by Hubble over the years. Neptune’s clouds have disappeared, and scientists think they know why Hubble picks up where the brief Voyager flyby left off by continually keeping an eye on the planet yearly.Ĭredits: NASA, ESA, Erandi Chavez (UC Berkeley), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley) NASA, ESA, Erandi Chavez (UC Berkeley), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley) They form above most of the methane in Neptune's atmosphere and reflect all colors of sunlight, which makes them white. ![]() In 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft provided the first close-up images of linear, bright clouds, reminiscent of cirrus clouds on Earth, seen high in Neptune's atmosphere. The chemical changes are caused by photochemistry, which happens high in Neptune's upper atmosphere and takes time to form clouds. This long set of observations shows that the number of clouds grows increasingly following a peak in the solar cycle - where the Sun's level of activity rhythmically rises and falls over an 11-year period. This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. Giant gaseous planets in our solar system, including Neptune, are known for the dark spots that appear in their atmospheres, such as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm. “Since the first discovery of a dark spot, I’ve always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are,” said lead study author Patrick Irwin, professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford, in a statement. ![]() These new observations are shedding more light on the phenomenon, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Space-based observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope have observed vortex-like storms - which appear as dark spots - swirling in the blue planet’s atmosphere before, but it’s the first time an Earth-based telescope has seen one on Neptune. The observation was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Astronomers have spotted a large and mysterious dark spot within Neptune’s atmosphere, and it has an unexpectedly bright companion.
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