You can also remember those images from the School Atlas of the World. The planets Uranus and Neptune were both blue there, yet distinctly different. While Neptune glowed with an azure hue, Uranus was depicted in a soft greyish, if you will, greenish blue.
But these images lied to us all along. He found out team of astronomers from the University of Oxford, who published his study this week in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
According to them, Neptune is only slightly darker in color than Uranus, for the less sensitive, the third and fourth largest planets of the Solar System can be almost unrecognizable, as you can see for yourself.
Foto: Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford
Above are images of Uranus and Neptune compiled from images taken by Voyager 2. Below, you can see what the planets look like according to the new Oxford study.
In fact, this information does not come as much of a surprise to scientists. As the Oxford astronomers write, it has long been known that most modern pictures of the planets do not show their colors correctly.
This is because 20th century images of Uranus and Neptune were always produced in a different color spectrum. And when complete images of the planets were compiled from them, they were not always adjusted to show the “true” color of the bodies, especially in the case of Neptune.
“Although the famous Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in near ‘true’ color, in the case of Neptune they were stretched and enhanced, rendering them artificially too blue,” explained Patrick Irwin, the lead author of the study, in a press release from the University of Oxford.
In the case of Neptune, scientists simply changed the contrast to highlight the clouds or the movement of the winds on the planet. According to Irwin, at first astronomers pointed out this difference, but the fact later faded from general awareness.
“When we applied our model to the original data, we were able to reconstruct the most accurate color renderings of both Neptune and Uranus to date,” explained Irwin.
The blue color of both planets is caused by the high content of methane in their atmospheres, a gas that absorbs green and red light, reminds the British daily The Guardian.
The researchers also shed light on the mystery of why Uranus appears to change color during its seasons. In summer and winter, when the planet’s polar regions are tilted toward Earth and the Sun, they appear slightly greener.
A computer model revealed that this is due to lower methane content in the polar region as well as the haze from frozen methane particles found at the pole. It scatters light and thus increases the reflection of green and red wavelengths.
2024-01-05 17:00:31
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