It’s a color beloved by interior designers, but the duck-egg blue also appears to be sprinkled throughout the solar system, with research suggesting it’s the true color of both Uranus and Neptune. It has been.
This new study confirms the common belief that Neptune has a deep blue color, and instead suggests that both planets are similar in color, with Neptune only slightly bluer than Uranus.
Professor Patrick Irwin, lead author of the study from the University of Oxford, said: “Uranus still looks bland and boring, but Neptune also looks quite washed out in a full true-color reconstruction.”
It has long been known that the color of ice giants is the result of high levels of methane in the atmosphere, a gas that absorbs green and red light. A study by Irwin and colleagues suggests that Neptune was the slightly bluer of the two planets because one of the aerosol layers in its atmosphere was more transparent.
But images created from data collected during flybys by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in the 1980s have led to misconceptions about the planet’s true color, with Neptune’s images highlighting its faint features. Because the contrast was emphasized, it is depicted as a deep blue. .
“These images were published with captions that said ‘enhanced’ or ‘stretched,’ but over time these captions were inevitably separated from the images and the relative nature of these two planets “This has led to long-standing and persistent misconceptions about color,” the researchers wrote.
The research team’s new true-color images reveal that both planets have a pale blue-green color, which is very bright even when using data from various instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope and from the Voyager mission. Similar results were obtained.
The study also sheds light on the mystery of why Uranus appears to change color depending on the season. Previous observations have revealed that the planet appears greener in summer and winter, when the polar regions are oriented towards the Earth and the sun.
Using computer models, the researchers found that this is not only due to low methane concentrations in Uranus’ polar regions, but also because a haze of frozen methane particles forms above the sun-facing poles, scattering light and causing They suggest that this may also be due to an increase in green reflection. and red wavelength.
But Irwin said questions remain, including why methane concentrations are lower at Uranus’ poles and why such fog forms at the warmer poles.
“There’s a lot we don’t understand about these planets,” he said, adding that to learn more NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) need to work together to send probes to the planets. He added that there is.
“Rather than trying to piece together observations from remote sensing, we need to actually go into orbit and drop a spacecraft to see exactly what’s out there,” he says.
1 Comment
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