New images taken by scientists from the British University of Oxford showed the “true colors” of the planets in the solar system.
According to the British Sky News network, the new images revealed that the planets Neptune and Uranus are not the colors that were known, as they resemble each other more than previously thought.
Many people believe that the planet Neptune is a saturated blue color (sapphire blue), and its counterpart Uranus is greener.
A team from the University of Oxford used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s spectroscopic imaging device to show the planets in their true colors.
Professor Patrick Irwin and his team found that the two ice giants, the most distant planets in our solar system, have a similar shade of greenish blue.
Experts pointed out that the idea that the two planets have different colors arose because images had been taken of them in the twentieth century, including by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in the 1980s, which recorded images with separate colors.
“Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to true color, the images of Neptune were actually enhanced and thus artificially blue-shifted,” Irwin said.
He continued: “Although artificially saturated color was known at the time among planetary scientists, this distinction was lost over time.”
He added: “By applying our model to the original data, we were able to reconstruct the most accurate representation to date of the colors of both Neptune and Uranus.”
In this regard, Dr. Heidi Hamel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, who has spent decades studying Neptune and Uranus but was not involved in the study, said, “The misunderstanding of Neptune’s color, as well as the unusual color changes of Uranus, have confused us for decades.”
